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Sarah Wildman, a volunteer for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History branch conducted this interview on December 14, 1996 in Cranberry, NJ. The interview was transferred to the Museum's Archives on December 14, 1996.

Record last modified: 2018-05-09 09:21:46
This page: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn507545

Also in United States Holocaust Memorial Museum oral history volunteer collection

Consists of interviews with Holocaust survivors and concentration camp liberators conducted by United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History Department volunteer staff. The interviewees, among them survivors from Hungary, Germany, Austria, France, Italy, and Poland, discuss their experiences of life before World War II, life in the ghettos, life in concentration camps, and life after the Holocaust.

Marie Schwartzman discusses her early life in Paris, France; her large Polish family; her father’s arrest and imprisonment in Drancy; becoming the head of the family due to her mother’s illness; hiding house for three months; being arrested and sent to Drancy in October 1942; being deported to Auschwitz; living conditions in the camp; working in the crematorium sorting clothes; being marched to Ravensbruck in January 1945; living conditions in Prchin-Malkov camp; liberation by the Americans; turning in a German officer who was arrested; returning to Paris and Grenoble; immigrating to the United States in 1949; and marrying an American soldier.

Nathan Kalman (b. Natan Kalmonowitz) discusses his early life in Lodz, Poland; joining a Zionist organization in 1930; living on a kibbutz in Krakow for a year; marrying in 1939; the beginning of the German occupation; his mother’s work smuggling food; moving into the ghetto; the deaths of his mother, father, and son; being deported to Auschwitz in cattle cars; keeping a photo of his family in his shoe; conditions in Auschwitz; being moved to Gurlitz; working in an ammunition factory; liberation; remarrying; immigrating to the United States; and living in Israel from 1969-1989.

Esthy Adler discusses not knowing her real name or when and where she was born, noting that many of her childhood memories are vague; her papers that say she was born in Kaliningrad, Russia, where she thinks her parents had a summer home; staying with her mother’s sister in a compound where there were frequent bombings; her mother’s death during their stay; her father’s remarriage, despite the family’s disapproval; how the Germans found her, her father, and stepmother; the last time she saw her father; how she, her aunt, cousins, and stepmother were relocated to another compound where they slept on cots in places similar to bunkers; seeing a man digging a ditch and holding a machine gun; being lined up and fired upon, but surviving; finding her way back to the barrack where she found her stepmother and another woman; being loaded onto a cattle car and taken to another location (possibly Treblinka); escaping into the forest with her stepmother via a hole and tunnel dug by another woman; living with a partisan group that consisted of Polish-Ukrainian prisoners of war and Russian deserters; the death of her stepmother by machine gun fire in the winter of 1942; being shot; becoming ill from drinking poisoned water and being nursed back to health by a peasant; living with a woman named Margot who got her a job in a factory sewing pants; leaving her job after a man paid for her to go to a private school; living with the Katz family; becoming legally independent after she turned 18; attending graduate school and being accepted into a program where she was trained as a paralegal; meeting her future husband Jim Adler at the University of Heidelberg in 1954; and immigrating to the United States.

Tana Gelfer, born October 7, 1939 in Berlin, Germany, discusses her parents Herman George Reichman and Johanna Kahn and her family background in Gelsenkirchen, Germany; how her father lost his banking job after the Nazi party came to power; her father’s arrest on December 27, 1942; never finding out what happened to her father; her deportation with her mother to Theresienstadt; living conditions in Theresienstadt; sharing a bunk with her mother; how her mother worked in the fields harvesting crops and sorted through prisoners’ belongings; being hospitalized frequently; how a woman in the camp, Minnie Simon, gave birth to a son in secret; how Minnie Simon, her husband Fritz, and their child all survived; being made to watch, along with other small children, the cruel treatment of men who were brought into the camp from trains; her and her mother’s liberation by Russian forces; living with her grandmother in Berlin; immigrating to the United States; marrying and raising a family; and how her mother helped sponsor several people emigrate from Germany to the United States.

Maria Devinki, born June 1, 1920 in Hannover, Germany, discusses her family’s move to central Poland; her parents’ successful business there; the Nazi invasion of Poland; how Jews were forced to live in a ghetto; having to give up her large house; her father’s deportation to Treblinka where he perished; marrying her fiancé and being hidden with family members by a Polish farmer in small underground space; traveling with her husband to Regensburg, Germany to wait for U.S. visas; and settling in Kansas City, MO.

Jerome Stasson (b. Jerome Stashevsky) discusses his early life in Detroit, Michigan; coming from a family of Polish immigrants; being drafted into the U.S. army in 1943; following General Patton to Germany from England; liberating Buchenwald; his first impressions of the camp; speaking Yiddish to the survivors; destroying the letters he sent home to his family due to their distress; and his memories of the smell of the camp.

Adriana Funaro, born in Rome, Italy on July 28, 1923, describes her early life in Rome, Italy; being expelled from public school in 1938 and afterward attending a Jewish school and a Catholic school; her father’s decision not to emigrate; a doctor’s efforts to help her father avoid a roundup in 1943; hiding with her sister in a Dominican convent; living under a false name; learning prayers while hiding; working in a partisan group while in hiding; the arrival of American soldiers; marrying a childhood friend; immigrating to the United States; and her nightmares about the war years.

Ernest Kolben describes his early life in Vienna, Austria; feeling like an outcast at school; his brother’s arrest and imprisonment in Dachau on Kristallnacht; changing conditions for the Jewish community; being sent to Theresienstadt; living and work conditions in the camp; being moved to Auschwitz in September 1944; volunteering to move to Buchenwald; arriving instead at Kaufering, near Dachau; being force marched to Camp Allach; liberation by American soldiers; his 30 day hospitalization; working for the Counterintelligence Corps to find SS members; returning to Vienna; marrying; immigrating to Montreal; moving to Chicago; and splitting his time between Vienna and the US.

Henry Kolber (b. Hirsch Kolber), born June 6, 1923 in Przysietnica, Poland, discusses his early life in Barcice, Poland; moving with his family to Nowy Sacz, Poland after the German invasion; how the Germans shot and killed 15 Jews and selected 100 other Jews, including his father, to be locked up overnight; working as a grave digger with his father after the Aktions; how he was selected by the Judenrat to go to Rabka, Poland; upon arrival he discovered it was a school to train Ukrainian volunteers to become SS; being assigned work to dig a shooting gallery in the mountains where the new recruits would learn to shoot; covering graves and filling them with dirt and antiseptic; the commander, Rosenbaum, whom he testified against in Hamburg, Germany in 1968; his parents’ deaths in Treblinka; being sent to Krakow to build Plaszow concentration camp; being transferred to Auschwitz; marching in December 1944 in the snow for two days then being taken to Buchenwald by train; living in the barracks with Elie Wiesel; being liberated by American troops; moving to Switzerland with the help of the Red Cross; immigrating to the United States in 1947; and his marriage and children.

Ruth Greifer (b. Ruth Dahl) discusses her childhood in Geilenkirchen, Germany, and Mastricht, Netherlands; her experiences during the German invasion of the Netherlands; her life in hiding during World War II; her reunion with her parents after World War II; and her life in the United States after 1948

Anna Wollner (b. Jakab) discusses her early life in Nagy-Varad, Transylvania (Oradea, Romania); her fiance’s conscription into forced labor; his return and their marriage; being forced into a ghetto; her feelings about wearing the Jewish star; being sent to Auschwitz; being transferred to Stutthof; her friend Suzy, who taught her to sabotage the materials they were working on; being moved to Riga, Latvia by boat; building roads out of Jewish headstones; acts of violence by guards; being marched back to Germany (near Gdansk, Poland); liberation by Russian soldiers; witnessing rapes; returning to Budapest, Hungary; reuniting with her husband; leaving for Munich, Germany after the communists arrived; immigrating to the United States in 1949; divorcing and moving to Israel; returning to the United States; and her feelings about German reparations.

Kate Wacz (née Katalin Kadelburger), born in 1932, discusses her childhood in Budapest, Hungary; her father’s death performing forced labor; going to the Jewish gymnasium; the Germans arriving in March 1944; the school closures; moving to the ghetto; anti-Jewish violence from members of the Arrow Cross Party; the Allied bombings in January 1945; living conditions in the ghetto; liberation; readjusting to life after the war; her mother becoming a Swedish citizen; getting passage to Sweden in 1951; and her life after the war.

Erwin Forley (b. Feuerstein) discusses his childhood in Košice, Czechoslovakia, (now Slovakia) and Munkacs, Hungary (now Mukacheve, Ukraine); his life in the Munkacs ghetto; his family's deportation to Auschwitz at the hands of Hungarian gendarmes; his work in Budy, a sub camp for farming near Auschwitz; his experiences with Kapos in Auschwitz, some of whom he describes as homosexuals; the evacuation of Auschwitz and liberation by Russian troops; his return to Mukacheve; his reunion with his mother and sister; and the family's life in the United States after 1946.

Ernie Marx (né Ernest Ludwig), born in Gelnhausen, Germany on November 8, 1925, discusses his childhood in Gelnhausen and Speyer am Rhein, Germany; his experiences during Kristallnacht; his arrest by the Gestapo and imprisonment in Dachau along with his father in November 1938; his father's work to organize Kindertransports of Jewish children from the Rhein area to France; his travel to France on a Kindertransport; his imprisonment in Gurs concentration camp; his involvement in the Maquis resistance group in France; his reunion with his mother and brother after World War II; and his life in the United States after 1947.

Doris Rauch, born August 26, 1920 in Brno, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), discusses her childhood in Brno; the death of her father in 1936; the German invasion of Czechoslovakia; being unable to attend a German-speaking university because she was a Jew; attending a textile school; working in a factory; buying goods on the black market; her deportation to Theresienstadt on a passenger train; volunteering to work planting trees in Bohemia with her mother; returning to Theresienstadt after six weeks; avoiding transports to the East; being put on a transport in September 1942 along with her mother and boyfriend; being taken to Raasiku, Estonia and separated from her mother; being taken to Tallinn, Estonia in December 1942 to clear rubble for the Holzmann construction firm; being taken to a camp in Ereda at the end of 1943; how she and other women stopped menstruating; working in the forest; a romantic relationship between a prisoner and an SS commander; being given a ring by male inmate; contracting hepatitis in Ereda; being taken to Stutthof; how she had written in a diary every day in Estonia; being very sick; arriving at Bergen-Belsen in April 1945; taking another prisoner’s place to work in a factory; finding fliers saying that the Allies were approaching; being taken to the Danish border at the end of April 1945 and turned over to the Danish Red Cross who provided food, care, and new clothing; living in Sweden for two years working as a secretary for the World Jewish Congress; living with two women she met in the camps; moving to the United States in May 1947 and experiencing culture shock; marrying and moving to Chicago, then Pittsburg, and then to Washington D.C.; the effect of her experiences on her religious beliefs; and reparations from Germany.

Joseph Elman, born February 5, 1922 in Pruzhany, Poland (present day Belarus), discusses the German and Russian occupations of Pruzhany; his memories of the murder of 11 Jews in Pruzhany by Nazis; being forced into slave labor; the relocation of his family into the ghetto; daily living conditions in the ghetto, which included starvation and crowding; his work in the ghetto’s food department; the liquidation of the ghetto starting in January 1943; his father’s membership in the Judenrat; his father’s suicide; how he and others built a bunker in the ghetto; his contact with a resistance group which was smuggling weapons into the ghetto; his escape from the ghetto with a large group of people during the liquidation; his experience living in the woods as part of a partisan group; forming family bonds with members of the group; liberation by the Russian Army; returning to his home in Pruzhany to find a family living there; living with this family for a period of time; moving to Bialystok, Poland to join his brother; settling in Lodz, Poland; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.

Gerald Rosenstein (b. Gerhard Rosenstein) describes his early life in Darmstadt, Germany; being attacked and beaten by a schoolmate’s father as a child; immigrating to Amsterdam with his family in May 1940; trying to leave for England after the German occupation; the persecutions Amsterdam’s Jewish community faced; being separated from his family in Westerbork; being sent to Theresienstadt; reuniting with his parents there; living conditions in Theresienstadt; partaking in propaganda for the Red Cross; being deported to Auschwitz with his father; being transferred to Gleiwitz; working conditions in camp; being marched to Blechhammer in January 1945; how he felt at liberation; traveling through Poland, Romania, and Odessa before boarding a Red Cross ship to Paris;

Ivan Becker, born in 1929, discusses his childhood in Budapest, Hungary; his memories of the "hanging priest of Budapest" who killed Jews for refusing conversion to Christianity; the Nazi invasion of Hungary; harsh restrictions on Jews; his father who was sent to Buchenwald; being sent on a death march with his mother from Budapest towards Austria; being separated from his mother and never seeing her again; his life in hiding; his experiences in an unnamed ghetto; his return to Budapest after liberation; his time in a displaced persons camp in Bad Gastein, Austria; his immigration to the United States as a "war orphan" in 1946; and his adjustment to life after the Holocaust and success in business.

Romana Koplewicz (née Margitte), born April 26, 1919 in Warsaw, Poland, describes her pre-war life in Poland; her parents and sister; her father’s dye factory; her education at a private Jewish school; her law school education at the University of Joseph Pilsudski in Warsaw; the antisemitism she experienced in law school; meeting her husband in 1936; her inability to complete law school due to anti-Jewish legislation; the beginning of the war and ghettoization in Warsaw; working in her father’s factory; her father’s arrest and return in the spring of 1940; the liquidation of the ghetto; her work sewing German uniforms; her escape with her family from numerous selections; the false papers she and her sister acquired in 1943; her work in the ghetto in a manufacturing factory; working as a housekeeper to survive; her time in Otwock Poland working as a chambermaid in summer 1944 at a convent; her escape to Grodzisko Mazovieckie, Poland because the Gestapo were looking for her; her time working for a German in Warsaw; the Warsaw ghetto uprising; the ghetto’s evacuation and her transfer to Piastów, Poland; her survival and return to Warsaw; her reunion with her husband and their marriage; leaving Warsaw for Germany with her husband; her time in Germany with her husband waiting for their visa to the United States; her immigration to the United States in May 1949; her master’s degree in social work; and her two children and her life in the U.S.

Joseph Koplewicz, born December 7, 1915 in Kielce, Poland, describes his pre-war life in Kielce; his parents and siblings; his father’s occupation as a businessman; his education in Kielce and law school education in Warsaw; his family’s religious attitudes; his experiences with antisemitism while attending law school; the beginning of the war; his arrest in Kielce for not wearing a Star of David badge; the ghettoization of Warsaw; performing forced labor in Warsaw; his father’s death due to health complications; his stay with his sister and her husband in a comfortable apartment; his marriage in 1942; being wounded in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; his transfer to Majdanek concentration camp; his transfer to Budzyn labor camp near Krasnik, Poland until February 1944; his transfer to Mielec, Poland where he worked as a draftsman until July 1944; his short time in Wieliczka, Flossenburg, Litomerice, and Dachau; his transfer to Augsburg, Germany where he worked in airport construction; his time in Kaufering and Nuremburg; a forced march to Landshut, Germany where the SS guards in charge fled; the marchers subsequent scattering; his survival and return to Poland; his reunion with his wife; their decision to leave Poland and immigrate to the United States in 1949; and his post-war life in the United States.

Irving Schaffer, born May 26, 1928 in Chust, Czechoslovakia (present day Khust, Ukraine), discusses growing up in an Orthodox family; his early education; a teacher beating him in front of the class in 1943; experiencing antisemitism before the war; his father’s arrest for receiving milk from a neighbor; the deportation of his father and brother to labor camps; his family’s eviction from their home and deportation to the Chust Ghetto; conditions of the ghetto, such as the Jewish leadership; his assignment as a messenger and pass to leave the ghetto; smuggling in bread from outside the ghetto; people being punished for being Hungarian; being transported by train from the ghetto after three weeks; how partisans blew up the train and told prisoners to jump off and escape; arriving at Auschwitz in the spring of 1944; his memories of Dr. Mengele; being separated from the rest of his family at Auschwitz; being sent to Warsaw, Poland after only three days at Auschwitz; working to clean out the Warsaw Ghetto; prisoners escaping from the Warsaw ghetto; being marched out of the ghetto in August 1944; arriving at Kutno on the German and Polish border; being transported by train to Dachau; living in Camp Seven and working in Mühldorf in an ammunition factory; stealing potatoes and bartering with other prisoners; being transported from Dachau; finding a train transporting sugar that had been bombed and eating the hot sugar; being transported to the Landshut camp; working in Landsberg, Germany; a bombing by American planes; being released by the Germans and then chased down and beaten into a coma; waking up in a German hospital; organizations that assisted in reconnecting families, such as UNRRA and the Joint Distribution Committee; being liberated in Feldmoching, Germany; finding his brother in Chust; how the Russians did not let him leave Chust; escaping across borders into Germany; attending school in Munich, Germany; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.

William Klein, born in 1924, discusses growing up in Užhorod, Czechoslovakia (present day Uzhhorod, Ukraine), in a large family; attending Jewish school until the sixth grade, then entering a public high school; the friendliness between Jews and non-Jews in Užhorod; his two older brothers leaving in 1940 for Yugoslavia and Russia with the army; Jews being made to wear the yellow Star of David badge and comply with a curfew beginning in 1942; hearing rumors about Jews being killed in Poland; being forced into the ghetto in January or February 1944; being taken by train to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944; last seeing his parents and sister as they went through the selection process at Auschwitz; being advised by a kapo to volunteer for work outside the camp when he had the opportunity; being taken to what had been the Warsaw Ghetto along with his brother and brother-in-law to demolish buildings and clear debris; finding gold pieces in an abandoned house where he was working and hiding them in a belt; prisoners making up songs and singing as they worked; being forced to march to Dachau as the Russians advanced towards Warsaw; witnessing the death of a rabbi he and his brother had helped on the march; staying in Dachau for a few days; volunteering to work at a construction site; being seriously injured on the construction site and being helped by fellow prisoners, including one who was a doctor; escaping with his brother and brother-in-law from a train and hiding in a farmhouse as the Americans liberated the area; reuniting with his surviving family members in Bratislava and Užhorod; living in Sudetenland and then in a series of displaced persons camps in Germany (Wasserburg, Föhrenwald, and Bremerhaven) and applying to move to the United States; having his application delayed after being accused of being a communist; moving to Chicago in 1951; his pride in his Jewish identity; health problems caused by beatings he received during his time as a prisoner; telling his children about his experiences; and his response to the question of why he does not hate.

George Pisik, born May 25, 1925, describes his experience as a soldier in the U.S. Army’s 15th armored division, 10th infantry battalion; entering Dachau in May 1945 without any prior knowledge of concentration camps; his battalion’s doctor trying to help the prisoners; searching a guard who was subsequently taken by prisoners and killed in the barracks; meeting a 19 year-old female prisoner in Dachau and giving her the mezuzah his grandmother had given him to wear; receiving almost 100 mezuzahs from his family and friends after writing them; giving these mezuzahs to chaplains to distribute and to his fellow soldiers, telling them they were good luck charms; entering Munich and seeing the giant swastika on Munich Stadium, which his commander ordered to be destroyed by tank fire; seeing Germans surrender; conflicts with German civilians; suffering from trench foot and impetigo; returning to the United States expecting to be sent to Japan but staying after the bombing of Hiroshima; after his homecoming, using a swastika flag as a doormat, which drew the attention of the neighborhood and the police when his mother washed it and hung it out to dry; bringing home pistols which his mother took to the army depot to be deactivated; returning to college; his frustration with Holocaust deniers, including a Catholic priest he met in 1950 in Louisiana; the failings of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust; his feelings towards the Germans; his belief that a holocaust could happen again; his level of religious involvement; and the importance of education in preventing another holocaust.

Ruth Rosicka, born August 13, 1919 in Nowice, Czechoslovakia (present day Poland), describes her Polish father who was actively pro-Zion; escaping bombing in Bielsko, Poland; escaping through Krakow, Poland and being found by the Russian army; being deported to a camp in Siberia from which she was amnestied in 1941; being drafted by the Czechoslovakian army and working in the medical brigade, where in 1944 she met her husband; being taken to the Carpathian Mountains, to the war front, where they stayed until February 1945; being released from the Army in May 1945 because of her pregnancy; and living in Prague, Czech Republic after the war.

Salomon Cohen, born July 28, 1937 in Athens, Greece, discusses how his family escaped to the south of Greece in February 1943 with the help of partisans; hiding with his family in the mountains for six months; how the partisans obtained food from monasteries in the mountains for his family; using false names while in hiding; traveling to Izmir, Turkey then Syria; being captured by English troops; how the family was taken to British camps in the Gaza Strip; their escape with the help of a Jewish agency; traveling to Ted Aviv, Israel, where they lived from 1944 to 1952; going into the army as a tank fighter; going to Haifa, Israel after leaving the army; getting married and having children; and his visits to Greece.

Suzanne Foldes (b. Zsuzsi Morvai) discusses her childhood in Miskolc, Hungary; her Jewish and Christian schooling; pre-war antisemitism; training as a gymnast but being denied entry into the Olympics because she was Jewish; her father’s conscription into Hungarian forced labor; getting married in 1942 to Paul Berkowitz; terminating a pregnancy; the German occupation of Hungary; being confined to a ghetto; being transported to Auschwitz by cattle car; learning of her mother’s death by gassing; moving to Buchenwald; how she was good at stealing coal; liberation; returning to Budapest after the war; reuniting with her father; learning of her husband’s death; marrying a friend from before the war; immigrating to the United States in 1956; and speaking about her wartime experiences beginning in the 1990s.

Tibor Vince, born in 1910, describes his childhood near Budapest, Hungary; his medical studies in Italy; his escape to Cuba at the outbreak of World War II; his immigration to the United States; his work as a physician in the United States Army; his experiences at Dachau shortly after liberation; his medical treatment of Allied prisoners of war; and his life in New York, NY after 1945.

Elias Piorko, born on May 15, 1919, discusses his childhood in Zambrów, Poland; his life in a kibbutz near Slonim, Poland (now Belarus); his experiences with forced labor in Russia; being in four different camps; his travels through Europe on the way to Italy after World War II; and his life in the United States after 1950.

Benjamin (Beniek) Hildesheim discusses his childhood in Sieradz, Poland; his experiences with antisemitism and Jewish persecution in Sieradz before the Holocaust; his time in the ghettos of Sieradz and Lódz, Poland; his adoption by Chaim Rumkowski; his imprisonment at Auschwitz, Babice/Babitz (a small agricultural camp west of Auschwitz), and Buchenwald concentration camps; his participation in a death march to Theresienstadt, where he remained until liberation; his time in Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), immediately after liberation; his immigration to Palestine in the first Aliyah after World War II in 1945; his participation in the Israel-Arab War of 1948 to 1949; and his life in Brazil and the United States after 1962.

Peter Masters (né Peter Arany), born February 5, 1922, in Vienna, Austria, describes his prewar life in Vienna; his Viennese mother and Hungarian father; his escape to Britain after the Anschluss in 1938; his family’s internment as “friendly aliens;” his family’s reclassification as enemy aliens in Britain; his experiences volunteering for special hazardous duty in Britain and being assigned the 3rd Group, 10th Commando, an elite paratroop unit mostly consisting of Jewish or political refugees; his identity being anglicized for his protection; his work to petition for the recognition of Austrians who perished fighting the Nazis; his many family members who perished during the war; and his 1997 book, Striking back: A Jewish commando’s war against the Nazis, which he wrote as a counterpoint to the idea the Jews did not fight back during the Holocaust.

Joseph Wolke (Wolkeovich), born July 14, 1919 in Tomashov (Tomaszów Mazowiecki), Poland, discusses his family background and religious upbringing; his father’s successful farm outside the city; the rise of Hitler and antisemitism; racial laws against Jews; being deported during Rosh Hashanah; arriving in Krakow, Poland on a cattle train; his disbelief that the war would last so long; escaping from the Germans and returning to Tomashov by bus; how the farm provided for the family; increases in the deportation of Jews; living in the Tomashov ghetto; smuggling food into the ghetto; the liquidation of the ghetto on November 1, 1942; the mass burial of Jews in the ghetto for which he was forced to dig graves; being deported to Bergen-Belsen; being transferred on a cattle train to Auschwitz; forced labor digging ditches outside the camp; being relocated to Gross-Rosen camp; the death march from Rosen, which lasted over a week; starvation during the march; liberation by Russian forces; returning home to Poland; meeting his wife and having a child; immigrating to the United States in August 1950; living in Baltimore, MD with his wife’s family; adjusting to American life; creating a business; and learning the fate of his family members in the years following the war.

Ionel Ghelman, born on March 27, 1929 in Bucharest, Romania, discusses his mother’s death in 1938 and being raised by his maternal aunt; experiencing antisemitism; seeing boys in 1936 practicing to be in the Iron Guard in the future; the German occupation in 1940; the events in January 1941, including pogroms, stores being burned, and Jews being killed; ration cards and how Jews’ ration cards were half of Rumanians’ cards; the Allied bombardments of Bucharest from late 1943 to early 1944; seeing Russian tanks and troops in August 1944; leaving school in 1946 to work in a locomotive factory; rejecting the Communist Youth Party and feeling a connection to Zionist Hashomer Hatzair; going to Bukovina to prepare for kibbutz in Israel; the banning of Zionist organizations in 1949; being a draftsman for oil pipeline company from 1948 to 1950; marrying a Romanian woman in 1956; his children; being expelled from the Communist Party because parents went to Israel; getting visas for Hungary, France, and Germany in 1976; going to New York in April 21, 1977 with the help of HIAS; and settling in Washington and working for Bechtel.

Irimia Solomon, born on November 3, 1924 in Dorohoi, Romania, describes his parents, who were divorced; how he and his mother lived with his grandparents in Falticeni, Romania; his granfather’s farm; the Jewish community in the town and his family not being particularly religious; Jews in Moldovan cities; his education; playing soccer with non-Jewish children; hearing about antisemitism; wanting to go to Palestine; going to school in Bucharest, Romania to learn a trade; his relationship with his father; an uprising in Romania in September 1940; the Iron Guard (Garda de Fier); returning to Falticeni in December 1941; going to Dorohoi; his father being taken away in June 1942; being taken to forced work, unloading rail cards and sweeping; being deported with his mother to Transnistria and conditions during the journey there; having to trade in their Romanian money for Russian rubles; arriving in Sharhorod, Ukraine; being housed in a synagogue for several weeks; staying in a room in a house of a Christian family with other Jews; being in a ghetto, where there was religious life but no cultural life; building roads and sleeping overnight in rail cars outfitted with bunk bed; typhus in Sharhorod and helping to bury the dead; his mother not working and staying indoors; being helped by a cousin’s Christian husband; being taken back to Dorohoi in December 1943; moving from house to house until they could contact relatives; not feeling relief or happiness; his mother being treated as a war widow and being allowed to sell certain items, such as stamps, alcohol, and tobacco; returning to school and going to the polytechnic in 1945; waiting from 1958 to 1972 to get a passport; going to Israel, where his wife did not like the heat; going to Canada, where they settled in Toronto; working as an engineer; and moving to Montreal.

Lotte Salus (b. Charlotte Helena Cohen) discusses her childhood living near the Dutch border in Germany; working for a Jewish family; being arrested and pressed into labor after Kristallnacht; being sent to Amsterdam, Netherlands by her father; living with other Jewish teenagers in The Hague, Netherlands; learning her family had been deported to Westerbork; moving to Amsterdam in May 1940; receiving orders to register with the police; being deported to Westerbork; reuniting with her family; daily life in Westerbork; volunteering to go to Theresienstadt with her parents in 1944; her experiences in the camps Auschwitz, Stutthof, and Praust; being taken on a death march in March 1945; liberation by the Russians; sexual violence perpetrated by the Russians; returning to Germany; immigrating to the United States in 1949; and marrying and starting a family.

Irena Neumann discusses her childhood in Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic); not having a Jewish identity or religious education; evacuating Prague before the Munich Agreement; returning to the city and learning she was Jewish; adapting to restrictions placed on Jews; her feelings about wearing the yellow star; being deported to Theresienstadt with her family; daily life in the camp; contracting encephalitis; being deported to Auschwitz; conditions in camps Auschwitz and Sachsen Chemnitz; returning to Theresienstadt in May 1945; reuniting with her parents; liberation by Russian soldiers; returning to Prague; beginning university; being arrested and released by communists; and immigrating to the United States in 1956.

Hans George Hirsch discusses his early life in Stuttgart, Germany; his father’s role as executive director of the German Jewish Community; graduating gymnasium in 1934; prewar antisemitism; the difficulties he experienced attending university and holding a job in Nazi Germany; visiting Palestine in 1937; receiving a visa to leave for the United States in 1937; working on farms in the U.S.; trying to get his parents out of Europe; teaching German prisoners of war farm management from 1943 to 1946; his career trajectory in food administration and policy; and his retirement from foreign agricultural service.

Milton Shurr, born January 28, 1911 in the United States, describes his work with the Jewish Welfare Fund in Oklahoma City, OK in the early 1940s; his draft into the military and entering Officer’s Candidate School; being shipped overseas to England, where he worked in preparation for D-Day in June 1944; his recruitment by the Civil Affairs Unit of the Military Government to gather and identify medical supplies left behind on Omaha Beach, France; helping to provide food for the 15,000 survivors of Buchenwald and working with the Red Cross and Joint Distribution Committee; traveling to Bavaria, Germany to work has a health welfare officer; working to reopen schools, hospitals, banks, and other institutions in Germany; maintaining correspondence with his wife in America during the war; returning to the United States after the war and moving to Chicago as an assistant in health planning; and sharing what he had witnessed in Buchenwald after years of being unable to speak about it.

Ludwig Jacob discusses his early life in Schmalkalden, Germany; being arrested with his parents on Kristallnacht; being imprisoned in Buchenwald for a month; leaving on a Kindertransport to Holland; living in a children’s home; the German invasion; moving to his brother’s home in Amsterdam; the arrest of his brother, who subsequently was imprisoned and died in Mauthausen; receiving a deportation notice; choosing to live under a false identity; moving to Paris, France and working with the underground; sabotaging the German defense organization where he worked; being denounced and arrested; spending time in Fresnes prison before being deported to Drancy; jumping off the train on the way to Buchenwald; rejoining the resistance; working for Americans in Paris; immigrating to the United States in 1947; and his marriage and life in the US.

Barbara Feuerstein Artman, born September 12, 1923 in Kosice, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia), discusses her parents Elizabeth and Henry Feuerstein and two younger brothers; her 14 aunts and uncles and 27 first cousins, who all perished in the Holocaust; her family’s move to Mukacheve, Czechoslovakia (now Ukraine), which in March 1939 was occupied by Hungry; the Nazi invasion of Hungary in 1944; being forced to live in a ghetto; conditions in the ghetto; her deportation with her family to Auschwitz; conditions in Auschwitz; the treatment of camp guards; being sent to a labor camp near Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) with her mother; their liberation by the Russians while on a march; walking, at the end of the war, to Krakow; reuniting with one brother; attending medical school but changing her major to chemistry; contacting uncles in United States who arranged for visas and transportation to the US for her, her mother, and her brother; and settling in Forest Hills, NY, where she married another refugee and had one son.

Fritz (née Frederic) Schonbach, born in 1920, discusses his middle-class childhood in Vienna, Austria; attending private school until Jewish restrictions began in 1938; how life changed with the Nazi annexation of Austria; anti-Semitism in Austria and the terror campaigns; fleeing to Italy then to England in 1939; his family fleeing to Argentina while he remained in England; his internment in England because of his Austrian background; volunteering for the Australian army; daily life in the army; being discharged in 1946; enrolling in art school after the war; meeting his wife; reuniting with family in Argentina; immigrating to the United States in 1959; and discovering what happened to various family members in the war.

Charles Barber, born in 1932 in Budapest, Hungary, describes his father, who owned a liquor store; attending a public grade school, where some of the non-Jews wouldn't speak with him; his memories of the first bomb being dropped in Budapest in 1939; his father being drafted into the labor corps of the Hungarian army; his mother’s work as a tailor; being an only child; his father dying after two months in the labor corps; his mother being taken to a camp for eight months in 1943; living with several different people; his mother returning home; his memories of feeling guilty for telling his mother that he was hungry; the Jews being summoned to the courthouse in town and being separated from his mother by the officials; going to live in an orphanage with a Swedish flag out front; the Russian army and their activities in Budapest; his aunt sending him to the Red Cross then a Zionist orphanage in Sagat; returning to Budapest to work in a factory; attending law school but leaving when the revolution began; going to Austria and then the United States with the help of the Red Cross; living with an uncle in the US; becoming an accountant, attending Queensborough Community College and then Bernard Baruch College; working for ABC Transnational Transport; getting married to an Austrian Holocaust survivor; the effects of his Holocaust experience; losing his faith when he lost his parents; visiting Europe; antisemitism in Hungary; wanting to go to Israel; possessing a letter from his mother, which she wrote while she was in Bergen-Belsen, and a picture of his parents (which is in the USHMM Photo Archive); and his other family pictures.

Tibor Borsos, born on March 12, 1927 in Budapest, Hungary, describes his highly intellectual Catholic family; his family moving to Debrecen in 1936; having many Jewish friends; how he “looked Jewish” and was sometimes made fun of; his family’s possession of an American flag, National Geographic magazines, and a censored version of Time magazine; his family burning the American flag March 21, 1944 to be safe; his family storing carpets, silver, and jewelry for Jewish friends and hiding them in the university library; his mother being denounced, arrested, and released; his family leaving Debrecen in May 1944; witnessing Jews being rounded up; going to Budapest and living next door to a Swedish protected house; the closing of schools in the fall of 1944; his family going in December 1944 to Halle an der Saale, Germany, where his father taught in a medical school; being drafted into the Hungarian Army in March 1945 and riding on a train for two months to avoid finding his unit; finding his brother on May 8, 1945 in Mitterald; being rounded up by Patton’s troops and sent to Ludwigshafen, Germany; being sent to a POW camp in Heilbronn; going to Gottingen in the British Occupation Zone; sailing to the United States in December 1949 on the USS Harry Taylor; earning a Ph.D. in chemistry at Johns Hopkins; researching cancer at NIH; marrying a survivor of Bergen-Belsen; and his feelings about not being officially Jewish.

Robert Kertesz, born in 1933, discusses his childhood in Budapest, Hungary; antisemitism in Budapest; his family; his religious upbringing; being stuck in Hungary due to travel restrictions; his father being conscripted into the Hungarian Army; the Hungarian Nazis and Arrow Cross Party members in his neighborhood; the increasing antisemitism and abuse; how the ghetto grew in 1943; finding safe houses for children; escaping from the ghetto after his parent’s deportation; hiding in his Christian aunt’s home; returning to Budapest to escape violence; returning to the ghetto; living conditions in the ghetto; liberation by the Soviets; looting by the Soviet Army in the city; working as a guide and interpreter for Russians; his parents’ return; living in a displaced persons camp; immigrating to the United States in 1948; and his life in the U.S.

Fred Kahn, born December 19, 1932 in Wiesbaden, Germany, describes being raised until he was six years old by an aunt (Rosa Nassauer) in Wehen, Germany; his older brother, Walter; his Christian friend, Walter Kaltwasser, who protected him from young Nazis; being raised religious by his aunt and uncle; his grandfather dying in 1938; being sent after the Munich Agreement to Aachen, Germany, where he crossed the border and joined his parents and brother in Verviers, Belgium; his father’s successful career as playing bridge; his aunt and uncle being sent to Lodz, Poland; starting school in Belgium; his parents and life in Verviers; going to Liege and Brussels in May 1940 with his family; returning to Verviers; Jews having to register; the small right-wing party, Rexiste, which collaborated with the Nazis; his father being interrogated; getting false identities with the last name Jejeune; being taught Catholic prayers; getting scarlet fever in the spring of 1942; leaving his school after getting in a fight; his principal helping him; going into hiding and the various ways he entertained himself; moving from village to village in 1943; getting a job in 1944, carrying milk; being liberated in September 1944 by the American Army; life when he was in hiding; his mother’s accused of being a German spy and arrested; the Battle of the Bulge; events he heard about involving the underground; factors that helped him survive; developing a sense of humor; and considering Verviers his hometown.

Susan Warsinger (née Hilsinrath), born in 1929, discusses her family and childhood in Bad Kreuznach, Germany; her memories of Kristallnacht; escaping to Paris, France; being homeless; fleeing to Versailles when the Germans invaded; going to Château des Morelles, a home for homeless children; her schooling; getting tickets to the United States from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society; immigrating to the U.S. in 1941; her life in the U.S.; her feelings about returning home to Europe; and her life since the war.

Hans Arnold Wangesheim, born in Nuremberg, Germany on July 25, 1924, describes his parents divorcing in 1930; his mother placing him in a very strict Jewish orphanage in Furth; his encounters with Hitler youth; getting passage on a Kindertransport with help of Quakers in 1938; going to Chicago, IL then Milwaukee, WI; running away from a Jewish orphanage and being placed with a family in Janesville, WI; attending a watchmaker’s college; enlisting in 1942 in the Army Air Corps and being a B-17 tail gunner; his training plane crashing in Utah in 1943 and being severely injured; going to OSS (Office of Strategic Services) in Washington in 1944; going in late 1944 to Paris, France then Germany; crossing the Rhine with the 4th Division behind German lines picking up mail from agents; seeing Nuremberg bombed; going back to Furth; going in April 1945 to Dachau to get important political prisoners, including the former French Prime Minister Leon Blum; locating the prisoners in Innsbruck, Austria; his counterintelligence work for de-Nazification and working with Hugh Trevor-Roper to hunt down Wilhelm Zander; being assigned to trace enemy assets including Nazi treasures and Reichsbank gold; his work interrogating Germans, doing anti-Soviet intelligence, and being sent to Czechoslovakia as a contact for Hungarian agents; returning to the US, attending school, and working for the US Treasury; and working for a law firm.

Sia Hertsberg (née Izrailewitsch), born June 8, 1927 in Riga, Latvia, describes her early family life and schooling; the Jewish community and the state of antisemitism in pre-war Riga; the 1940 Russian invasion; her family’s persecution at the hands of the Russian communists; the 1941 Nazi occupation and implementation of Nazi race laws; the burning of Riga’s synagogues; the help her family received from non-Jewish friends; the establishment and the later liquidation of the Riga ghetto; how a Latvian soldier attempted to rape her; avoiding the Rumbula massacre; working as a seamstress in a Reichskommissariat workshop; her family’s transport to the Kaiserwald concentration camp; how her father saved her sister several times by hiding her amidst the trash or in a pot of soup when the Nazis were looking for young children; the Nazis’ theft of her childhood; the normalcy of discussing death; her family’s transport via ship and cattle car to Stutthof; the typhus epidemic and her work carrying the dead to the crematorium; her mother’s death; her and her sister’s escape from a death march; seeking shelter and being turned away by Polish peasants; liberation by Russian soldiers on March 23, 1945; hospitalization and her sister’s death; her deep depression at losing her family; her hospitalization in Kolomna, Russia; her return to Riga and reunion with her father; falling in love with her future husband; their attempts to illegally immigrate to the United States and her father’s subsequent imprisonment by the Russians; the birth of her two sons; finishing her schooling; her husband’s death; her move to Chicago, Illinois and her post-war life in the United States; and her father’s death on the same day as her sister, thirty years later.

Chava Frajhof (née Geister), born September 20, 1923 in Belzyce, Poland, discusses her family; the German invasion of Poland in 1939; hiding from the Germans; paying the Judenrat to be assigned work in Będzin, Poland; working as a seamstress; being sent to Kraśnik, Poland in 1943; being liberated by the Soviets; fleeing to Lublin, Poland; having a family; going to Frankfurt, Germany then Berlin, Germany; and immigrating to Brazil in 1953 to join her family.

Israel Frajhof, born March 3, 1920 in Krasnik (near Lublin), Poland, describes experiencing violent antisemitism in 1933; the establishment of a ghetto in the fall of 1942; the typhus epidemic and conditions in the ghetto; working outside the ghetto; the deportation of old men, women and children deported to Majdanek and Treblinka in December 1942; trying to become a policeman but being declined permission; doing carpentry work for Germans making furniture; appels, beatings, and sleeping in the synagogue; meeting his future wife Chava Geister, who was in Krasnik camp; the Russians’ arrival in Lublin on July 22,1944; the death march to Germany and escaping into the forest for 10 days; meeting up with Chava and going to Krasnik; going to Lublin; getting married in January 1946; going to Berlin , Germany and being helped by the UNRRA; going to Frankfurt, Germany; going to Brazil in 1953; visiting Majdanek in 1986; and living for his wife and children.

Edward Novakoff, born in 1926 in Boston, Massachusetts, discusses his Ukrainian and Lithuanian immigrant parents; enlisting in the U.S. Army in December 1943; being shipped to Marseilles, France with the 90th Infantry Division; seeing his company wiped out in November 1944; fighting in southern Germany in January 1945; arriving at Flossenbürg in May 1945 and seeing the conditions and the survivors; his transfer to the 26th Regiment, 1st Infantry in August 1945; guarding prisoners for the Nuremburg Trials; having contact with Nuremburg prisoners; returning to the U.S. in December 1945; his life after the war; and helping to create the largest Jewish cemetery in the Boston area.

Nicole Yancey (née Guggenheim), born July 26, 1941 in Saint-Amand-Mont-Rond, France, describes having one sister, Nanette, born November 1938; being separated from her family when she was two years old and sent to a farm to live in a safe and secure environment; still today calling the farmer and his wife her real grandparents; members of the French Resistance coming in for meals because the farm was close to the demarcation line and there was lots of Resistance activity; her daily routine of working, hiding, and eating; how her relationships were all very harmonious; being moved back to Orléans, France when she was five years old and starting school; the severe personality changes of her parents because of their experiences during the Holocaust; the torment her father experienced because he was not able to save his brothers from being murdered; being sponsored by a French/American agency to attend William and Mary College, where she met her husband; remaining in the Tidewater, VA area; converting to Catholicism because her husband is Catholic as are her children; her position now as Consul for the French Embassy in Norfolk, VA; and her assertion that tragedies like the Holocaust will continue as long as people do not learn to accept each other and their differences.

Jaffa Munk (née Noemi Donath), born April 10, 1931 IN Ónod, Hungary, describes her father Philippe, who was a Rabbi, and her mother Olga Shick Donath; having one brother, Joseph, and one sister, Esther Judith; living a very normal life with a family that was religious yet open-minded and encouraged academics; the many changes that began in 1942 and 1943; being moved in May 1944 to the ghetto, where her father was put in charge; being sent to Auschwitz; the brutal arrival and her father’s last words to her: “Wherever you go, continue to believe in God;” being marched to Birkenau, which was the very last time she saw her mother; being selected by Mengele in September 1944 to go to Bergen-Belsen and the grim living situation there; the forced evacuation in January 1945 and a subsequent six week death march; escaping to a forest and being liberated May 8, 1945 by Russian soldiers; eventually returning to Budapest, Hungary, where she lived at an Orthodox refugee orphanage facility, which was started by Esther Eckstein with education as the primary goal; going with a Zionist group with 1800 refugees to Palestine on a boat leaving from Bucharest, Romania and the refusal of the British to allow them entry, but finally being allowed to land at Haifa, Palestine; the break-out of war in 1947 and the desperate living conditions during the war; being taken to Tel Aviv, Israel, where there was less danger and where she attended teacher’s seminary; meeting her husband, who was in the Army; the birth of her first son, Gabriel, which was the highlight of her life because it meant continuation of her family; her teaching positions, starting with 1st grade, where students came from 30 different countries; and how her personal strengths are her sense of hope and having a positive outlook.

Frances Hirshfeld (née Frieda Miriam Rosenbloom), born in 1918, discusses her family and childhood in Opatów, Poland; moving to Zawiercie, Poland and its local Jewish population; the beginning of the war; her religious life; antisemitism; Kristallnacht; going into hiding in Ukraine and returning to Poland; the Judenrat; adjusting to anti-Jewish laws; moving into the ghetto; living conditions in the ghetto; being deported to Auschwitz in 1943; living conditions in Auschwitz; being moved to Birkenau; contracting typhoid fever and scabies; lack of medical care; bombings near the camp; returning to Auschwitz; hearing about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; working in a munitions factory; being on a death march to Ravensbruck; escaping into a forest; liberation by the Soviets; immigrating to the United States in October 1946; her husband immigrating to the U.S. in 1949; visiting Poland; her feelings about Holocaust deniers; and her life after the war.

Moris Glukman, born in Suceava, Romania in 1924, discusses his childhood; the rise in antisemitism; deportation announcements; his arrival in Bessarabia (in Moldova and Ukraine) with his family and how the peasants took the belongings of the Romanian Jews; travel to Moravia, Czech Republic; living at the mercy of the Romanian Gendarmerie; the spread of typhus and diphtheria during the winter of 1941-1942; how the Ukranian police guarded the village in Moravia; the German entrance into Moravia; building bridges and excavating coal from open mines; his knowledge about events in Bessarabia and Russian positions and the approaching front; working in a Kolkhoz; being liberated by the Russians; his schooling in Bucharest, Romania; and immigration to the United States in 1983.

Margie Rosenthal (née Margaret Mary Mijinski), born July 19, 1927 in Gleiwitz, Germany (Gliwice, Poland), describes her prewar childhood; her family’s immigration to the Philippines after the Nazi invasion so that her father could continue in the lumber business; her pleasant life in the Philippines until the Japanese bombing in December 1941 and subsequent invasion; severe changes in their lives in Pasay City as Americans began bombing nearby Manila; the delay in her family’s move to the United States in 1948 as a result of immigration quotas; her life in San Francisco; and her marriage to her husband, Ernie.

Emma Mogilensky (née Hubert), born May 22, 1923 in Kronheim, Bavaria, describes living in the house that had been built by her great-grandfather; having one brother and one sister; living in a friendly and peaceful community until Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938 when antisemitism became so violent that she was sent to Nuremberg, Germany; enrolling in a very strict, all Jewish high school; moving to Augsberg, Germany after her father was released from Dachau; the children’s transport, going to Munich, Germany and being transferred to a boat; finally arriving in London, England, where she and the other children were chosen for English homes such that not one of them would become a public charge; being sent to live with a couple, both physicians, who were extremely helpful; attending school again where English Literature became her best subject; being a Fire Watcher at St. Paul’s Cathedral and joining the British Army when she was 17; antisemitism in the Army; being a cook for 2,000 men; receiving her GED; subsequently attending college on the GI Bill; a trip to Israel with her children after her husband’s death; finding that the cemetery where her grandparents were buried was not desecrated and finding their graves; visiting her foster parents in England every year; and her serious commitment to speaking about the Holocaust.

Isaiah Henig (née Yeshiah Henig), born in 1915, discusses his childhood in Szydlowiec, Poland; his family and the Jewish community; his religious upbringing; the absence of antisemitism before the war; changing anti-Jewish attitudes after the German occupation; the outbreak of the war and changes in daily life; being conscripted for forced labor; the creation of the ghetto; living conditions in the ghetto; working as a laborer in Starachowice, Poland; diseases in the camp; working to build replacement parts for machines; not believing reports about Jewish deaths; being deported to Birkenau in the summer of 1944; working in a factory; being moved to other concentration camps, including Mauthausen and Hannover; Allied bombing of the area; being deported to Bergen-Belsen; living conditions in the camp; his job building cannons; liberation by the British; moving to a displaced persons camp; immigrating to the United States in 1951; his life after the war; and his feelings about what happened.

Ida Henig (née Markowicz), born in 1924, discusses her family and childhood in Lódź, Poland; Lodz’s Jewish community and economy; not experiencing antisemitism before the war; changing anti-Jewish attitudes when the Germans invaded; fleeing to Częstochowa, Poland; working in the ghetto; not believing stories of mass murder; the Jewish police; liberation by the Soviets in January 1945; going to Germany; coming to the United States in the 1950s; the fates of her family members; and her feelings about the Holocaust and war.

Marcel Drimer (b. Marceli Drimmer), born in 1934, discusses his childhood in Drohobych, Poland (present day Ukraine); his family; his religious upbringing; life before the war; the Russian occupation; the German invasion in 1941; the looting of Jewish property; the deportations in 1942; moving into the ghetto; the fates of his family members; Ukrainian and German police; the Judenrat; hiding in an attic for a week; escape plans being postponed due to the death of his father; how his female relatives were saved by a woman who was recognized as a righteous gentile; their living conditions while in hiding; liberation by the Soviets; adjusting to life after the war; his education; difficult living conditions in Poland; post-war anti-Semitism; immigrating to the United States in 1961; his family going to Israel; and his feelings about the war, Poland, and anti-Semitism.

Michael Silberstein (née Mieczyslaw Silberstein), born in 1930 in Grudziadz, Poland, discusses his family; life before the war; the arrival of the German Army when he was nine years old; moving to Lodz, Poland; the establishment of the Lodz ghetto; being an errand boy and getting arrested in 1942; escaping arrest; living conditions in the ghetto; being deported to Birkenau in the summer of 1944; being sent on a death march in January 1945; arriving in Mauthausen; conditions and life in Mauthausen; liberation by the Americans; reuniting with his family; meeting family in England; immigrating to the United States in1952; being drafted into the U.S. Army; and his life after the war.

Joan Schwab (née Nussbaum), born on March 24, 1926, describes living in the Tiergarten area of Berlin, Germany; her memories of Kristallnacht and how two men came for her father; being placed on a Children’s Transport to England on May 21, 1939; staying with Norman and Elsie Denham and going to secondary school and Hebrew school; her brother joining her in August 1939; evacuating in September to Chichester; conditions in the home, where she shared a bed with four girls and showered every two weeks; graduating from high school in 1944 and going back to Denhams in London; sleeping in an air raid shelter when V2 rockets attacked; going after the war to the Joint Distribution Committee in Munich, Germany and finding out that her parents perished in Auschwitz and her grandfather died in Theresienstadt; and immigrating to the United States in 1947.

Erwin Deutscher, born on January 28, 1923 in Vienna, Austria, describes being raised with thorough religious training; being in the Zionist Youth group, HaShomer HaDati; how his maternal grandfather had gone to the United States in 1898 to Oklahoma City, OK; his Bar Mitzvah in 1936; hearing about Hitler’s arrival on March 11, 1938; his father’s dairy business closing; his mother being arrested; getting notice that his youth group was going to go to Palestine and meeting Eichmann at the emigration office with his father; conditions getting worse in Vienna; traveling with 25 others by train to Trieste and by boat to Haifa and arriving October 24, 1938; going to Mikveh Israel agricultural school for two years then to Bnai Akiva yeshiva for another two years; working for Haganah and meeting his wife; fighting in the Israeli War of Independence; his father being taken to Dachau after Kristallnacht and then to Buchenwald from June 1939 to January 1940; his parents immigrating to the United States; his life after the war working for a life insurance company; and getting a Ph. D. in Hebrew letters at Hebrew Union College.

George Pick, born in Budapest, Hungary on March 28, 1934, describes his very large extended family; his father losing his job in May 1939 and being sent on labor brigade in September 1940 for three months; seeing German tanks in the streets on March 9, 1944 and the subsequent anti-Jewish laws after including wearing the yellow star and not being allowed to attend school after April; his father having to leave again; being ordered to move to special Jewish houses in the summer of 1944; the air raids in Budapest and the massive bombings on July 2, 1944; his father’s return; he and his mother joining his father in hiding in a uniform factory building in November 1944; the factory being raided December 2, 1944 and bribing their way out; being taken to a Red Cross building and running away; going to the ghetto on December 14, 1944 and his father being in the ghetto police; the siege of Budapest; Wallenberg saving Jews from a massacre in January 1945; liberation; starting school; his Bar Mitzvah in 1947; attending university; going to Austria and then the United States, where his uncle lived; working for the Navy as mechanical engineer and retiring in 1996; his three marriages and not having children; and his commitment to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Hedi Pope (née Politzer), born March 18, 1920 in Vienna, Austria, describes her prosperous family, which was neither religious nor political; wanting to be a dancer as a child; the increase in anti-Semitism in Vienna; her memories, day-by-day, of Hitler’s invasion of Austria in March 1938; rising fears to speak out about Hitler’s actions; her memories of Kristallnacht; her father being sent to Dachau; the difficulty of getting all the documents to go to the United States; immigrating to the U.S. in January 1939; living in Newark, NJ; joining the Refugee Artist’s Group as a dancer; going to Miami University in Ohio and graduating in 1942; having two children; maintaining a dance studio in Alexandria, VA until 1980; and working with the volunteer corps at USHMM.

Bella Simon Pasternak, born in 1928, discusses her liberation from Auschwitz by Russians; walking home to Hungary during the winter; being hospitalized with frostbite and starvation; living in a displaced persons camp in Innsbruck, Austria; immigrating to the United States in 1946; her first impressions of the U.S.; Americans’ disbelief at her experiences; meeting her husband, who was also a survivor; her religious views becoming more orthodox; desiring to immigrate to Israel; coping with the Holocaust many years after it occurred and still experiencing nightmares; and how important her grandchildren are to her.

Marion Friedman (b. Traute Marion Julia Georgia Sulimas), born in 1922, discusses her childhood in Hamburg, Germany; being raised with her Christian mother and Jewish father; her parents’ upbringings; celebrating both Christian and Jewish holidays; her brothers’ immigrations to China and the United States; the Aryanization of her father’s bank; her mother’s resourcefulness; receiving a visa along with her mother to go to the U.S.; being sent to the U.S. on her own because her mother decided to stay with her father; learning of her parents’ arrest and deaths; adjusting to life in the U.S.; meeting her husband; returning to Germany long after the war; meeting her German family; and dealing with her losses on a daily basis.

Elizabeth Strassburger, born in 1938, discusses her childhood in a small town near Zakopane, Poland; her father’s arrest and imprisonment in Siberia; being forced into the Tarnow ghetto with her mother and grandmother; watching her grandmother being taken by the Germans; hiding under an assumed Christian identity; being drugged and hidden in a basement during dangerous times; the family who hid her and her mother; believing she was a Catholic; her Catholic schooling; liberation by the Russians; learning she was Jewish after the war; being smuggled out of Poland with her mother; living at a Jewish orphanage with her mother in Germany; learning her father was alive; moving to Italy to be with her father; immigrating to England with her family; immigrating to the United States; adjusting to life as a teenager in the U.S.; her marriage; studying social work in college; her volunteer work; and her family.

Jadwiga Dziekonski, born in 1919, discusses her family’s emigration from Kiev, Ukraine to Warsaw, Poland in 1921 because of the revolution; her Catholic upbringing; attending public school; following the political situation in Germany; meeting her husband; the German invasion and occupation; her father’s exile in London, England as a member of the Bank of Poland; moving to Warsaw with her husband; her husband’s role in the Home Army; her daughter’s birth in 1943; sheltering two Jewish women in her mother’s apartment; the Polish underground’s participation in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; the Warsaw Uprising; her husband’s arrest and imprisonment in Bergen-Belsen and Gross-Rosen; liberation; readjusting to life after the war; escaping to London through Sweden in 1947; leaving her mother behind; reuniting with her father; immigrating to Detroit in 1951; visiting Poland in 1988 to see her husband’s family; her feelings about being Polish; how she feels about Jewish people and German people; and her two visits to Israel.

Ruth Harvey, born in 1928, describes growing up with mixed Jewish and Christian heritage; her childhood in Berlin, Germany; being expelled from public school in 1938; attending a private Jewish school; witnessing the burning of Berlin’s temple during Kristallnacht; hearing Hitler’s speeches over loudspeakers; leaving Germany in 1939 with her mother to meet her father in Cuba; immigrating to New York in 1940 with her parents; growing up in New York City; moving to Washington, DC for a job with the State Department; getting married and having children; having a sense of confusion about her religious identity; why she chose not to visit any concentration camps; and volunteering at the USHMM.

Thomas Brown Gardiner, born on March 26, 1920 in St. Louis County, Missouri, describes being raised by his widowed mother; life during the Depression; working for a house painter as a teen in St. Louis; getting married in 1940; working for a manufacturer that made small parts for the M1 rifle; being drafted in 1944; training at Camp Robinson in Arkansas; being sent to England in the fall of 1944; going to France; being assigned to the 45th Infantry Division; seeing action in the Vosges Mountains and Alsace-Lorraine; participating in the capture of Schaffenburg; going through Nuremberg and Munich; liberating Dachau as a member of L Company in the 157th Infantry Regiment; guarding the camp while waiting for the military police to arrive; billeting in apartment buildings outside of the camp, where the Nazi officers had lived; typhus in the camp and the high death rate of the survivors; speaking with the survivors and being shown the camp by them; going to Munich then Augsburg for a month; being sent to Le Havre, France; returning to the US; working in military camps in Texas until his release; the effect seeing Dachau had on him; and how he feels stronger in his Christian faith.

Roberta Jones, born October 15, 1921 in St. Louis, Missouri, discusses growing up during the Great Depression; enlisting as a nurse in the United States Army; being commissioned as a second lieutenant with the 3rd Army and assigned to the 121st Semi-Mobile Evacuation Hospital; traveling by ship to England and helping in a hospital there; traveling to Luxembourg and then into Germany under dangerous conditions; going to Buchenwald; seeing a crematorium, stacked bodies, and starved prisoners still in uniforms; being offered bread by the prisoners; seeing a lampshade made of human skin in the office of a Nazi official; visiting a smaller liberated concentration camp and watching as American soldiers distributed clothing to naked prisoners; traveling with her hospital to a concentration camp near Linz, Austria (possibly Mauthausen); female nurses being kept outside of the camp fence as men worked inside the camp; meeting newly-liberated English prisoners of war who had been captured at the Battle of Dunkirk; returning to the United States and working at McCormack General Hospital in Pasadena, California; the difficulties of severely disfigured patients integrating into the community in Pasadena; marrying her husband; working at Camp Swift in Texas and Camp Polk in Louisiana, and, during the Korean War, in a military hospital in Michigan; encountering Holocaust deniers; and her insistence that her children know everything about her experience so that they can continue to spread the truth about the Holocaust.

Christine Cohen, born April 27, 1940 in the Warsaw ghetto, describes living in the ghetto until 1942 when they escaped; using forged papers showing that they were Christian; having one brother, born in 1948; being sent alone to live with a farm family; being helped and protected by an aristocratic woman, who had befriended an old German officer while she worked for the underground resistance; living with a series of families and caretakers; living in Walbrzych, Poland; not knowing she was Jewish until she was 10 years old and not admitting to it until she moved to Israel (seven years later) in 1957; visiting Germany and Poland after the war and going to Auschwitz, all of which was very difficult; wanting to stay in Israel but because of her parents, moving to the United States; the bitterness she still feels about having her entire extended family taken from her; the recurring nightmares and physical ailments that are all tension-related; and her current life in San Antonio, TX, where there are only a few survivors of her mother’s generation.

Hugh Jenkins, born December 29, 1914 in Lester, England, describes being the youngest of eight siblings, whose father was a Welsh minister; working before World War II with Quakers and being a conscientious objector even before the war; moving to London, England in 1944 to take part in training at a Quaker institute; being sent to Antwerp, Belgium after the training to do relief work; going to Belsen, Germany on April 22, 1944, soon after the camp had been discovered and the horrific scene; the various response processes at the camp; setting up a hospital, known as the “new camp,” maintaining a first aid station, and finding food; eventually being sent to Poland to be in charge of another camp; how even now he has a sense of desolation in how war is used to settle problems; working as the overseas secretary for the British Friends Relief Service until 1948, when he went to Philadelphia, PA to work with the American Friends Service Committee; and being sent to Washington, DC to be the director of the Foreign Student Service Center.

Rene Edgar Tressler, born April 16, 1927 in Strakonice, Czech Republic, describes his childhood in Strakonice; his parents and brother; escaping to Prague, Czech Republic to live with his grandparents; his brother’s selection to be on the Board of Elders at Theresienstadt; how Theresienstadt was used as a showcase for the Red Cross; his deportation to Auschwitz; his camp number; being moved to Birkenau; his movement to Blechhammer camp; his experiences on a death march in February 1945; his arrival at Buchenwald; reuniting with his parents and brother after the liberation; escaping Czechoslovakia in 1956; immigrating to the United States; and authoring several books.

Stefan Wohl, born February 4, 1934 in Vienna, Austria, discusses the Anschluss in 1938; leaving Vienna through Switzerland to Kraków, Poland; traveling with 14 family members in September 1939 to Jaroslav, Zloczow, and Kolomyja; being captured with his father in November 1939 while trying to cross the border; being released and going to Zloczow; being on a transport for six weeks with his mother, sister, and other relatives in July 1940; arriving in the Yakutsk, Siberia labor camp settlement; leaving in May 1941 by train through Moscow to Lvov where they were reunited with their father; the German invasion on June 22, 1941; going with his sister to a farm in Jaroslav; going to Budapest, Hungary via Monkacs, Hungary (Mukacheve, Ukraine) in the fall 1942; changing their name to Wolinski and pretending to be Catholic; going to Leanyfalu in 1943 and staying for a year; the family going to Seged (Szeged), Hungary; being captured and jailed; being released and staying with an uncle in Budapest; his father’s illness; being liberated by Russians in January 1945; going back to Poland in the spring 1945; going to Sweden in the summer 1946; sailing to Brazil in October 1946; attending school and a university in the United States; and being a film producer in Brazil.

Yehuda Adam (né George Strn), born on July 3, 1929 in Budapest, Hungary, discusses being raised in a reform Jewish household; being put into forced labor in Budapest; receiving a Schutzpasse and his family working for Raoul Wallenberg; being liberated by the Soviets in January 15, 1945; going to Palestine in 1949; going to the United States in 1962; and living in both Israel and the US.

Arlette de Long, born June 15, 1937 in Brocourt, Somme, France; describes her parents’ medical practice; her early love of the church and uncertainly whether her family was Jewish; villagers’ willingness to maintain friendship with the family because her father was the only physician in the village; having no memory of life before the war; the liberation of France; moving to a suburb of Paris, where she attended Protestant churches rather than synagogue; father’s unwillingness to discuss the Holocaust; her own reluctance to discuss the Holocaust until her sixteen year old daughter insisted that she talk about it; moving to the United States; her work as a psychotherapist for underprivileged children; and her feeling that her story is one of hope, compassion, and gratitude.

Eva Adam, born September 3, 1932 in Budapest, Hungary, describes her Orthodox Jewish family; her family’s awareness of what was happening to European Jews; their reluctance to leave Hungary; her father and brother’s membership in the Jewish Legion; serving as adjunct personnel to the Hungarian Army; changes in their lives in the late 1930s and early 1940s; her family’s unawareness of concentration camps before 1944; the Arrow Cross Party taking over the Hungarian police; deteriorating conditions for Jews; the murder of Jews at the Danube River; conditions in the ghetto; her post-liberation search for family members; finding that only three of her thirty-six family members survived Auschwitz; leaving Budapest in 1949; living in Israel and then the United States in 1961; her plans to return to Israel in the future; her pride in being a Jew and a Hungarian; the value in caring about others; and her strong work ethic as an explanation of why she was able to survive.

Herbert Jerome Bitter, born August 4, 1919 in New York City, discusses his parents who were Romanian immigrants; growing up in a Jewish neighborhood in Manhattan; becoming more religious during his service in the United Sates Army from 1943 to 1945; his experiences at Ohrdruf in 1945 soon after the Germans evacuated the camp; seeing three U.S. generals, Eisenhower, Bradley, and Patton, at the camp on April 5, 1945; the generals’ return visit on April 12, 1945 with photographers; how the freed inmates at Ohrdruf were eager to tell their stories to the American liberators; the effect of witnessing the horrors of the Holocaust had on his Jewish identity; and his reluctance to talk about his experiences during the war, especially to children.

Rachel Goldfarb, born December 2, 1930 in Poland (now Dokshytsy, Belarus), discusses her life following her liberation by the Russians and her time living in the forests near Bialystok, Poland with her mother; working and living on Russian trains; traveling to Prussia to find shelter provided by various Jewish organizations and the Red Cross; traveling to Italy’s southern coast; attempting to board a ship to Palestine but being blockaded by British authorities; eventually getting to New York City in November 1947 after two and a half years in Italy; visiting Washington, DC after graduation from high school; taking a job with the District Court; attending George Washington University at night; meeting her husband, also a Holocaust survivor, and marrying in 1952; raising two children, both of whom are architects; finally visiting Israel; her good life in the United States; and her advice about valuing what you have in life.

Tania Rozmaryn, born on June 16, 1928 in Vilnius, Poland (present day Lithuania), discusses her family as strong Zionists; the changes that took place after the German occupation; family’s escape towards the eastern Russian border; working in the house of an SS officer and being offered guidance on survival; frightening years in the Kovno ghetto; going into hiding until 1944 when the ghetto was liquidated; her deportation with her mother to Stutthof; her mother’s struggles and strategies, trying to make her look less like a child so that she would be chosen for work; being sent to various work camps until March 1945 when they were liberated by the Russians and taken to Central Poland to a displaced persons camp; being sent to Germany with false documents to a kibbutz in Munich; going to the American Zone and teaching at a school in Bergen-Belsen in 1947; getting married in 1949; immigrating to the United States in 1950; graduating summa cum laude from the Teacher’s Institute and receiving an M.A. from Queens College in 1960; moving to Maryland in 1990 where she received an M.S. in Marriage and Family Counseling; nightmares about her Holocaust experiences; and her feelings about her Jewish faith.

Franz Gunter Ephraim, born February 19, 1931 in the Schöneberg district of Berlin, Germany, describes his family and being raised Jewish but not Orthodox; living an integrated life in the community until 1937 and his participation in the 1936 Olympics events; how Kristallnacht was the impetus for his family immigrating to the Philippines; attending a Hebrew school in Manila before the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Japanese invasion of the Philippines; the politics in Manila; experiencing an open Jewish life; their favorite playing areas, holidays, their several living spaces, and the daily routine in Manila; the attack on Pearl Harbor and his memories of the alarms, airplanes, gas masks, and lack of school for about a year; how after the US declared war there were more air raids and an exodus from the Philippines began; how the US was closed to Jews who still had family in Germany and Europe and his family could not go to the US; the Japanese invasion of the Philippines; the many wartime restrictions, including food shortages, looting, changes in currency, and a new governmental organization; how 1944 was the year when things were really deteriorated and the people were starving; the daily air raids from B24 bombers; the Japanese systematically burning down the city of Manila; how February 1945 brought total chaos and there was no food for several weeks; the liberation of Manila by US forces; leaving the Philippines on November 19, 1946; arriving in San Francisco, CA where relatives were waiting for them, along with HIAF; the closeness of the Manila Jewish community in San Francisco; attending UC Berkeley until the Korean War when he was drafted into the Army and sent to Europe as an interpreter; becoming a US citizen in 1952; his philosophy that the importance of Jews as a nation is far more important than Jews as a religion and that self-reliance is the most important quality to have; graduating from UC Berkeley in 1957; and working for a naval architect specializing in submarines, United Airlines, and the Maritime Administration in Washington, DC.

Ernst Pieter Philipps, born December 5, 1931 in Essen, Germany, describes his twin brothers, who were three years younger; moving to Prague, Czech Republic in 1936 because of his father’s position with his company; life in Prague, which was normal until the Germans occupied Prague beginning April 1939; moving to Genoa, Italy and spending six months there; relocating by an Italian steamer to Quito, Ecuador, where living conditions were rather primitive and where at their second address they experienced antisemitism for the first time; spending two years in Ecuador; relocating to New York City, NY, where the instances of antisemitism directed at him were violent and ugly; his parents moving back to Rotterdam by 1950 while he remained behind in the house his parents had bought in Queens; attending City College of New York for five years and in 1955 joining the US Army and being sent to Germany where, among other duties, he worked as a teacher and Boy Scout leader for American and German boys; after leaving the Army, working first for the New York Times, a newspaper in Danbury, CT, and Business Week magazine; going to Washington, DC to work for McGraw Hill for 20 years; his experiences as a volunteer at the USHMM; and how he believes his experiences as a Jew have affected his outlook.

Joseph Ichiuji describes his parents as having immigrated to the US in the early 1900s; his father being a truck farmer and then owning a shoe repair business; working in a fish cannery and living in Fresno, CA until Executive Order 9066, which required that all Japanese Americans be evacuated to internment camps; being sent by train and truck to Flagstaff, Arizona, where they were assigned to barracks number three of the internment camp at Poston, AZ; conditions at the camp, which was run like an army installation with strict regimentation; volunteering for the 442 Combat Team, formed in 1943 and consisting solely of Japanese American soldiers who had families living in internment camps; fighting in Italy at the front lines north of Rome; liberating Livorno, Italy; helping liberate a subcamp of Dachau; conditions of prisoners still alive at the camp; helping two Lithuanian prisoners reconnect with important people in their lives; going home in December 1945 to find his parents released from the internment camp; helping his father with his business until May 1946 when he went to Washington, DC, where he worked in government service for 37 years; and the reunion of Japanese American soldiers in Los Angeles, CA, which a few of the survivors of Dachau attended.

Ruth Horowitz (née Salzburg), born March 23, 1930 in Hamburg, Germany, describes her Polish parents Isaac Salzberg and Rose R. Kleinert and her sister; life in Hamburg, where they lived until November 1938; leaving Hamburg two days before Kristallnacht; how Hamburg was very open to Jews until Hitler’s regime, though she experienced many instances of antisemitism; being fascinated with the 1936 Olympics; how her father’s efforts to leave Germany began in 1936 and finally succeeded when he dramatically threatened to commit suicide at the US Consul if the visas were not granted; how crossing the Atlantic was very difficult, with cold and seasickness, but they arrived and went to Detroit, MI for a short while, then to New York City, NY, and finally to Washington, DC; learning to speak English by going to lots of movies; her father’s death at age 54; her mother’s transformation from being a housewife to running her husband’s jewelry business after he died; the wartime antisemitism, the problem of quotas, the Nuremburg trials, and the State of Israel; getting married in 1950; traveling to Germany in 1995; and her views on present day Germany.

Hermann Kosak, born May 2, 1924 in Vienna, Austria, describes his younger sister, Margaret; how antisemitism was pervasive and being involved in instances of physical violence as early as kindergarten; the growth of the Nazi movement in Austria; the Anschluss in March 1938; seeing Hitler arriving in Vienna in his car; how quickly the Jews were affected by the Nazi’s changes; Kristallnacht and being arrested the next morning; trying to get out of Vienna at age 14 and finally getting to Brussels, Belgium with his mother; the Germans attack on Belgium; how enrolling in art school after the invasion was the most important thing he did; learning survival, watchfulness, and self-reliance at age 16; beginning a diary on May 9, 1940, describing daily life, and keeping the diary until three weeks before liberation; how out of 50 family members, 43 were killed in camps; finally getting visas for him and his sister in November 1947 by forcing his way into the US Embassy and leaving for the United States; arriving in New York City, NY; being a painting instructor; being drafted, released to Reserves, working for a while, and being called back for the Korean War; being married and eventually getting a job with Boeing as an illustrator; and his views on the effects of the Holocaust on humanity.

Dolly Bestandig (née Hirsch), born July 24, 1939 in Vilna (Vilnius), Lithuania, discusses her family, which had been in Lithuania for 11 generations; her father, who was a mathematical engineer, and her mother, who was a concert pianist; how her parents were both very religious and wealthy; being sent to the Vilna ghetto, the hardship of which marked the beginning of her mother’s psychological changes; the presence of 90 members of her mother’s family in the ghetto; how at age five, after living in the Minsk ghetto, she and her mother were sent to Auschwitz, where her mother managed to save her life by hiding her in a garbage can during the day while her mother worked; being moved to Bergen-Belsen with her mother and father after four months, where she was again hidden in a garbage can every day until liberation on April 15, 1945 by English soldiers; being sent to Sweden for medical care; being hospitalized in Gothenburg and then in Stockholm, where surgery on her palate was performed; leaving Sweden in 1947 and going to New York, where an uncle met her family; going to Mexico City, where two uncles were waiting; how her mother’s psychological state was deteriorating and she died in 1958; having flashbacks to her life in the camps; going to the Margaret Sanger Institute in New York City in 1967, where she received counseling help and tuberculosis was found throughout her body; recovering and adopting two children; being the Sub-Director of Hebrew instruction at the Yeshiva in Mexico City; and her feelings about her survival.

Goldie Gendelman, born November 17, 1933 in Lechowichi (possibly Lyakhavichy, Belarus), Poland near Baranowichi (possibly Baranovichi, Belarus), discusses her parents, Chaim and Chana Wolochiwianski; growing up in an extremely Orthodox family; being raised to speak Polish and Yiddish; her family’s attempt to immigrate to the United States; how she and her family made it to Cuba and stayed there for 11 years; living in Regla, Cuba; her struggles to communicate in Spanish; being run over by a bus in Cuba; how she and her family finally were able to immigrate to the United States in 1948; her paternal uncle in the United States who assisted with the immigration process; her experience with antisemitism in Poland and Cuba; graduating from high school in the United States; volunteering at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; and her feelings about leaving Poland, living in Cuba, and starting a new life in the United States.

Rhoda Kuflik (né Ruzenka Husen), born in October 1937 in Kitev (Kuty), Poland, describes living in the Kuty ghetto; escaping to Romania and hiding there; being liberated by the Soviets; and immigrating to the United States in 1948.

William Hess was born William Verna on August 8, 1921 in Stuttgart, Germany. He was an only child and lived a pleasant life there. Despite the Nuremberg laws, he was permitted to continue his schooling as his father served during World War I. Nevertheless, they lost the service of their maid. William experienced little anti-Semitism in Germany but knew that Hitler made anti-Semitic speeches and had newspaper articles written against the Jews. His father's business suffered little from the boycotting but he sold it in 1938. Anti-Semitism was more severe in the outlying towns than in Stuttgart. William studied English for two years before immigrating to Danville, Illinois with his uncle's assistance in 1937. He had difficulty adjusting to the US so had an English tutor. Additionally, he had difficulty living on his wages of $12.50 as $9 went toward room and board and he also had to cover tutoring and transportation expenses. Kristallnacht and his father's internment in Dachau influenced his parents to leave Germany in 1939 for Danville.

Jutta Levy, born in 1926 in Hamburg, Germany, describes growing up in a pleasant upper middle class family in a large Jewish community; listening to Hitler’s speeches on the radio and seeing him on a school field trip; witnessing Nazi book burning; learning of the death of Hindenburg; drastic changes in Germany after 1933; living in fear as children were taken from school and acquaintances disappeared; father’s dramatic pleading for visas to leave Germany; obtaining passage on the last train from Hamburg on November 6, 1938; traveling to Paris, France and then to Cherbourg, France, from which her family sailed to New York on the Queen Mary; arriving on November 11, 1938; learning about life in concentration camps from family members who survived the Holocaust; and her return to Hamburg and visit to Bergen-Belsen as an adult.

Wolfgang Mueller, born in Hanover, Germany on March 10, 1919, discusses his father’s role as a leader in the Jewish community and being head of B’nai B’rith; being aware of the Nazis at an early stage and seeing posters on kiosks denouncing Jews; refusing to say “Heil Hitler” in school and being advised by the principal to leave the country; going to London, England the summer after his Bar Mitzvah (1932); attending Ewell School and going back to Germany on vacations, pretending he was English; attending Cranbrook School with funding from a relative, Max Nordhaus, in the United States; receiving an affidavit from Nordhaus and getting a visa to the US; arriving in the US July 26, 1936 and moving to New Mexico; his mother and sister emigrating; hearing about Kristallnacht; being drafted in September 1941 and being sent to Florida; being in the Signal Corps; applying to officer’s candidate school and being in a group that called themselves the fighting 614s; being made into an MP after his superiors found out he was from Germany; being stationed in Tampa, FL and Jacksonville, FL; getting his American citizenship; volunteering to go overseas; being stationed in England as a technical supply sergeant and a liaison with the RAF; working after V-E Day in the Air Technical Intelligence Office; interrogating prisoners in Czechoslovakia and Austria and engineers at Zeiss works; being in Nordhausen for an hour; translating V-2 documents; being discharged on January 11, 1947; getting married; working in the meat business, real estate, and as a wholesale fish company; being proud to be Jewish; and his dedication to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Klari Rudnai (née Takacs), born May 19, 1930 in Budapest, Hungary, describes her well-to-do family that was not at all religious; her older sister; her father, who was her hero, and her strict mother; how their cook was instrumental in saving their lives by getting counterfeit papers with non-Jewish names for them and by bringing them food as they hid in a one-room apartment in 1944; moving to a nice hotel and having to go to the hotel’s underground bunkers during all the bombing for almost nine months; her father’s seven siblings, who were all sent to Auschwitz; going back to the hotel, the Vadasqur, until it too was bombed; moving to a new villa in 1946; how when she was 19 years she was picked up by Russian soldiers in a jeep and had to fight her way out of an attack by them and was saved by American soldiers who took her to the hospital for a few days; marrying an American soldier and wanting to go to the United States; finishing high school; how the solitary military life and moving a lot to odd places didn’t suit her; divorcing her husband and moving back to Washington, DC; getting married in 1960 to a Jewish doctor, who had been in many concentration camps and was instrumental in getting her interested in her Jewish religion; volunteering at the USHMM in the Archives and Volunteer Services; enjoying all parts of talking to people and the volunteers in her job; and reading a lot of books and newspapers about the Holocaust.

Jill Pauly, born May 1, 1933 in Cologne, Germany, describes her large, very well-to-do country family; the efforts of her grandmother and uncle to get money to Holland and make arrangements for the family to get to Kenya, where they bought two cattle farms that eventually were very successful; wanting a more orthodox Jewish life after the war; moving to New York City then moving to Vineland, NJ; her family buying a chicken farm, which was destroyed by a hurricane in 1952; the death of her father when he was 66 years old; her mother being her guiding light in terms of religious practice; attending the Pierce School of Business in Philadelphia, PA; working for the Quakers and then for a synagogue; getting her real estate license at the University of Maryland; her two adopted children; retiring in December 1993 from real estate; volunteering at the USHMM in Visitors’ Services and in the Office of Survivor Relations; having very strong feelings about people having access to the Museum; and some of the artifacts that she’s donated to the Museum.

Jack Ruben was born Yaakov Ruben on December 8, 1921 in Cincinnati, Ohio and after six months the family moved to LA. He was the only child to Joseph and Sarah Basha Ruben who came from Russia and were not religious. His mother was a garment worker and his father sold fruits and vegetables in a horse and cart in the local area. Due to an eye condition, Jack went to a health camp for a year. Jack's father left the family in 1927 and since lost track of him. Jack was placed in foster homes until the 11th grade and would visit his mother on the weekends. He graduated from high school and worked his way through UCLA by working part-time. In summer of '43 Jack volunteered for the Air Corps and was sent to Pomona College for nine months to study meteorology. He was not picked to be a meteorology officer so joined the infantry and was selected to be a coding clerk. He went to several camps and was shipped to Le Havre. His division had little information of the overall war and no details of concentration camps. From there he was part of the effort to form a bridge over the Moselle and next in a major assault at the Rhine River. Jack was in the Division furthest east in Germany which took many German prisoners as they quickly drove east. His company going east and meeting a surrendering German battalion who were permitted to march on their own. His company formed perimeters around villages and often stayed overnight in a civilian's home. They went through a rural area and saw dead prisoners and dead horses along the road without understanding the situation. They reached Ohrdruf Concentration Camp and saw a few emaciated prisoners leaving and many dead bodies piled up or laying on the ground. Jack did not realize it was a concentration camp at the time or that others existed until later when he returned to the US. The Army newspaper did not publish such information. From there, they went to the Czech border for 3 months which they guarded until VE Day. Then Jack was relocated to a relocation camp near Paris until Christmas '45 when he was shipped home and arrived in NY on New Year's Day '46. He was discharged and married a second time as his first wife was killed in an auto accident. Subsequently, he received a BA in economics, MA in family counseling and PhD in psychology and has practiced 10 years in the field. He has four children. Jack still does not understand how the crimes in the concentration camps could have been performed by fellow human beings.

Tilda Finzi Cohen (née Mazel Tov “Tilda” Finzi) born in Split, Yugoslavia on July 11, 1933, discusses Germans passing through their city in early 1941; her father getting called into the army and returning after one month; the Italians occupying Split, closing businesses and setting a curfew; not being permitted to go to school and the formation of community Jewish schools in different locations around city; her uncle being imprisoned and bringing him food; the Italian capitulation in September 1943; her family joining other people fleeing to partisans in the mountains; going with her mother to Brac Island, to Vis Island; sailing to Bari two days before Yom Kippur; living in a camp then a private house; the Germans dropping gas bombs on ships on December 2, 1943; her family moving to a village near Bari and attending school; attending a Seder arranged by the Jewish Brigade in Bitonto, Italy in the spring of 1944; how after the war their relatives told them of the camps and atrocities and advised them not to return to Split; her family moving to Milan, Italy in 1948; her family immigrating to the United States in 1950; finishing high school and attending college; getting married; and feeling that she is not a part of any country and that she lost her childhood.

Zwi Golombek, born in Warsaw, Poland on September 15, 1934, describes his father’s large construction business; the formation of the Warsaw ghetto and his family moving into one room on Nowolipki Street; his father’s ability to exit and enter the ghetto because he possessed building permits; being aware of danger and seeing beatings; his father striking a German guard in early 1942 and being taken to a ghetto prison then Treblinka; her Uncle Mietek placing him with the Abramzuc family in Jozefow, Poland and his mother and sister disappearing from the ghetto two weeks later; staying hidden for three years and his uncle visiting often and playing the family to hide him; being called Henyek; his uncle placing him in a kibbutzim in Poland and Germany after the war; going to Israel on October 6, 1948; working in Tel Aviv and joining the Israeli army in 1952; fighting war in 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982; getting married; and his two sons.

Samuel Hagner, born November 1, 1925 in Philadelphia, PA, discusses his Quaker parents; becoming a Quaker member at age 14; going to a Quaker work camp; being told about antisemitic events in Europe by a Jewish friend named Doris Weil and not believing her; his brother being a conscientious objector and working in a forestry camp during war; attending Oberlin College; being inducted into the army in January 1944 as a 1-A-O; training as a medical corpsman; sailing to Europe in December 1944; joining 7th Army in Germany and moving as the front moved; being made an armed guard at a billet even though he refused to carry a gun; going by truck to help liberate Dachau; the overwhelming experiences of seeing Dachau and feeling anger towards the SS guards; staying in the camp for one week; wavering about being a conscientious objector and writing to Doris to tell her she was right; going to a German hospital with nuns; going to France and the war ending before he was deployed to the Philippines; becoming a scrub nurse during plastic surgery on war victims in Indiana; being discharged and returning to college in the fall of 1946; practicing psychiatry for adults; living with his Dachau experience but not being at peace with it; and his continued abhorrence of war.

Guta Jacobson (née Rogowitz), born on April 23, 1925 in Łódź, Poland, discusses her early life in Łódź; relations between Jews and Christians; her activity in a Zionist organization; various holiday celebrations; the German invasion of Poland and the implementation of Nazi race laws; food shortages; the establishment of the Łódź ghetto; her family’s indecision on whether or not to flee; life in the ghetto; losing her faith in God after seeing her parents give up their children; her father’s disappearance; the typhus epidemic; hearing rumors of Chelmno and Auschwitz; hiding from the liquidation of the ghetto and their eventual deportation to Auschwitz in August of 1944; her immediate understanding of what was happening in the camp; Dr. Josef Mengele taking her mother away; being transported to a camp in Birnbaumer, Germany, to work digging anti-tank trenches; the differing conditions of various camps; hiding in the woods during a death march; her return to a liberated Łódź; marrying her husband; her reunion with her sister who had been recuperating in Sweden after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen; immigrating to the United States; the birth of her children; the death of her husband; her avoidance of discussing her experiences with her children when they were young; her motivations for sharing her story now; and her hopes that the world will never forget.

William Luksenburg describes going on a death march from Regensburg, Germany to Lebenau, Germany; a German farmer picking him up from the road, where he fell; being brought by the farmer to American troops stationed in the nearby town of Laufen, where he was treated for malnutrition; his cousin coming to the same camp a few months later; returning with his cousin to Bayreuth, Germany, where there were other family members; reuniting in Prague with his future wife, Helen, whom he met in the Blechhammer work camp; getting married in 1947; receiving money and support from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency; attending a technical school organized by the Organization for Rehabilitation through Training; immigrating to the United States in September 1949 with Helen; and becoming a mechanic and starting his own business.
[Note: This interview focuses on the interviewee’s post-Holocaust experiences. There is an earlier interview focusing on the interviewee’s Holocaust experience. This interview can be accessed by requesting RG-50.030*140.]

Rose Weisfeld (née Friedman), born on March 28, 1914 in Radom, Poland, discusses her early life and schooling; social integration between Jews and Christians at home and at school; keeping Jewish customs and traditions at home; her religious education; her brothers’ conscription in the Polish army; being badly injured and hospitalized for a year; her family’s forced relocation to the Radom ghetto; her father’s death; the liquidation of the ghetto; doing factory work; being transported to Auschwitz via cattle car; the process of selections; being transported to Ravensbrück in 1944; being liberated by Swedish soldiers and their compassion; weighing 32 pounds at liberation; her hospitalization in Denmark and Sweden; finding work in a factory and regaining her humanity; her marriage in Sweden to another survivor; the birth of her children; finding her brother through the Red Cross after four years; immigrating to the United States to be with her brother; the difficulties of adjusting to life in the US; and the importance of raising her children with Jewish traditions.

Ruth Greifer (née Dahl), born May 30, 1922 in Geilenkirchen (near Aachen), Germany, discusses her father, who was a cattle dealer, and her Dutch mother; attending a private Catholic school and experiencing antisemitism but being treated well by the nuns; how the plaque on father’s business was shattered in 1938; moving to Valkenburg, Holland in the spring of 1938; Germans occupying the city on May 10, 1940 and her family hiding in catacombs during the bombing; having to wear the yellow star and obey curfew; her father’s business being taken away; the Germans ordering them to leave in June 1942, but she was allowed to stay because she was sick; her brother and two aunts being taken to Auschwitz; how a Mr. Jansen from the underground arranged for she and her parents to go into hiding; going to a coal miner’s house, while her parents went to another; being thought of as a risk and being relocated to a doctor’s house to be a maid; going into hiding at the Robertson’s house near Treebeek and Hoensbroek with another Jewish woman; getting money from the underground organization; hearing about the June 1944 invasion; going to a house in Treebeek; the heavy bombing in the city and hiding in a potato bin for three days; being liberated September 17, 1944; returning to her parents in Valkenburg; the loss of all of her mother’s Dutch family; sailing to the United states in the spring of 1948; settling with her sister in Pittsburgh, PA; getting married April 8, 1951 and having three daughters; moving to Washington, DC in 1957; and her feelings about Germany.

Nesse Godin (née Galperin), born on March 28, 1928 in Siaulai, Lithuania, discusses her life after the war; being liberated by the Russians in Chynowie (known as Chinow in German) near Wejherowo, Poland on March 10, 1945; suffering from typhoid and dysentery and weighing 65 pounds; joining her mother and brother in Feldafing DP camp; going to ORT and UNRRA sponsored classes; getting married to Jack Godin, who had escaped from the Vilna Ghetto and whose family was killed in Ponary; having her first child in Munich, Germany; immigrating to United States in 1950 and settling in Washington, DC; becoming a citizen in 1955 and working as a dressmaker for 26 years; raising her children; sharing her Holocaust experience; working with the UJA, Jewish Community Council and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and the US Holocaust Memorial Council; working on projects at USHMM, including the “Remember the Children” exhibit, the ID project, and within the education and development departments; and her thoughts on the Holocaust.

Maryla Korn (née Orgel), born on June 10, 1938 in Kraków, Poland, discusses going with her mother first to Wieliczka and then to Bochnia between late 1940 and early 1941; hiding with a peasant family but crying so much that she was returned to her mother; going to a ghetto in Bochnia at the end of 1941; her mother working outside the ghetto in a factory; taking messages outside the ghetto and bringing back food; leaving the ghetto in June 1943 and separating from her mother; carrying diamonds and money, but no luggage and bribing Germans and the Judenrat; traveling by truck to the border then by foot at night; being guided by paid partisans; her grandfather being shot at Bochnia cemetery, her grandmother being taken to Auschwitz, and her uncle being taken to Belzec in the summer of 1942; being by Czech collaborators in Kosice, Slovakia; being released and proceeding to Hungary with help from the Joint; being caught and sent to a prison in Budapest and the Joint getting her out; going to Usod, Hungary in the fall of 1943 and staying there until April 1944 under name of Orglowska; living as a Christian; being treated for gangrene in her leg; the roundup of Hungarian Jews in April 1944; her mother stealing passes and going to Budapest; staying with a Jewish Polish friend and then going to Bucharest, Romania with help from the Joint; almost boarding two different ships in Constanta, Romania going to Palestine, one of which (the Merkur) sank and the other ended up in Cyprus; being liberated by the Russians in the spring of 1945; going to Budapest and staying in a children’s home while her mother went back to Poland to check on family; her mother setting up a business in Vienna, Austria with an uncle; her father returning traumatized from the war; going to Brussels, Belgium in the winter of 1946-1947; going to Israel in 1951; living in both Israel and Brussels until immigrating to the United states in May 1961; getting married in June 1961 to David Korn, who is also a survivor; visiting her parents in Germany; and her work translating for USHMM.

Michel Margosis, born in Brussels, Belgium on September 2, 1928, discusses immigrating to the United States in 1943; being taken in by father’s cousin in Brooklyn, then to foster home; his parents coming to the US in 1946; graduating from high school in 1947; graduating with honors from Brooklyn College in 1951; enlisting in the army and being sent to Germany as an interpreter but requesting to be transferred; becoming a medic near Verdun; feeling very American, but did not speak about his childhood with other soldiers; his feeling about Germany; working at USHMM with the Speakers Bureau and translating materials; speaking about his past; and being featured in the book “The Triumphant Spirit” by Nicholas del Calzo.

Lena Jurand (Salzberg), born in Przemysl, Poland on September 13, 1917, discusses being an only child, educated in a Catholic school then at a music conservatory; meeting her husband Julian Jurand in 1931 and getting married in May 1940; living in the Russian part of town; her father being chosen for the Judenrat when the Germans took over; Jews having to give up jewelry and wear a star; the ghetto being formed in July 1942; moving with parents and in-laws from Lvov; working in a factory disinfecting uniforms; her father being taken away and how she went to the Gestapo headquarters and saved him from deportation to Auschwitz; meeting a Polish woman in the factory who offered to hide her and Julian; hiding for 22 months in room off of kitchen in a woman’s apartment; being liberated by Russians in August 1944; living in an apartment with her husband and cousins; living in Munich, Germany with UNRRA staff of the Neu Freimann DP Camp; teaching music to child survivors in camp for one year; moving to Genoa, Italy, where Julian practiced medicine; visiting her uncle for six months in New York, NY; going to the United States in 1951; living in New Jersey, where Julian worked in state hospital as a psychiatrist; and Julian becoming the clinical director at St. Elizabeth’s in Washington, D.C.

Wallace A. Witkowski, born January 12, 1928 in Kielce, Poland, discusses his escape from Poland on a ship to Goteborg, Sweden in 1948; going to the United States; how his sister was caught by the communists and imprisoned; his struggle to find his father who had immigrated to the United States earlier; settling in Detroit, Michigan and adjusting to American life; how his mother and sister arrived in the U.S. later; attending high school and then Wayne State University; getting married in 1951; working as a radio disc jockey using the on-air name Jan Alexander; earning a law degree; working in Washington, DC and traveling between the United States and Poland; working for the Federal Trade Commission; living and working in Micronesia; his thoughts on religion and how the Holocaust affected him; his identity as a Catholic; his work as a translator; and his work with the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission.

Jacob Wiener (né Koppel G. Zwienicki), born March 25, 1917 in Bremen, Germany, discusses his experiences in the United States after World War II; the reaction to the war by the American media; his wife’s experience on the Kindertransport; his memories of watching Nazi war crime trials on television; his thoughts on Israel and Palestine; the Eichmann trial; how he was involved with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum from its founding; Holocaust education in American schools; antisemitism in the United States; and how he founded a school for mentally disabled children in the 1950s.

Noah Roitman, born in Baranowicze, Poland (Baranavichy, Belarus) on January 10, 1923, discusses his religious upbringing and schooling; being very athletic; receiving warnings from his Christian friends in November 1938; his town being under Soviet rule in 1939; people being deported and his house being burned down; the German invasion on June 27, 1941; the formation of a ghetto on December 12, 1941; wearing the yellow star and working in arms factory; joining the resistance group of Mome Kopelovitz; the first action in the ghetto in March 1942; joining the partisans led by Pougatchov in the forest in August 1942; his activities sabotaging trains and bringing others out of ghetto (saving approximately 80 people); being sent to Pinsk, Belarus in late 1943; joining a group led by Major Igor, attacking trains; being ordered into Russian Army in Slutsk, Belarus in December 1943; fighting Germans and seeing Warsaw destroyed; being wounded by a sniper outside of Berlin, Germany; running a canteen for the Russian Army at the end of the war; returning to Poland; helping Jews get to Czechoslovakia; being captured and jailed, but escaping to Lodz, Poland; meeting his wife; traveling through Germany and France to get to Israel; being detained in Cyprus for 3 to 4 months; having a construction business in Israel; and immigrating to the United States in October 1963.

Richard W. Peterson, born September 29, 1925 in Iowa, discusses his family’s Danish background; growing up in a Baptist family; first learning about the war in Europe and his family’s concern for Denmark; antisemitism in Iowa; hearing about the attack on Pearl Harbor; his involvement with ROTC and Boy Scouts; attending Drake University; joining the Army Specialized Training Reserve Program (ASTRP); reporting to Fort Crook for the reserve program and then to Camp Dodge in Iowa; being sworn into the U.S. Army; training at Camp Livingston in Louisiana with the 86th Blackhawk division; being assigned to A Company, 342nd Infantry; being sent to Le Havre, France; traveling through France, the Netherlands, and Germany; fighting in a battle in Attendorn, Germany; entering what appeared to be a factory in Attendorn and seeing starving people there; the reaction of his comrades to seeing the prisoners; the liberation of Auschwitz; being sent to the Philippines from September 1945 to March 1946; finishing his degree at the University of Iowa; graduating from law school in 1951; getting married; his father’s appointment to the Iowa Supreme Court; how he was a United States Magistrate Judge; his three children; and how he feels about American current events, politics, and world news.

Riane Gruss (née Wohl), born on August 18, 1932 in Vienna, Austria, describes her father, who was a banker in Kraków, Poland and an industrialist in Vienna, and how her parents lived half a year in each place; she and her siblings being raised by a governess in Vienna; being in Kraków on September 1, 1939; going to Jaroslav, where there was bombing, then to Zloczow and to Kolomyja; her father and brother being captured at the border and her brother’s release; returning to Zloczow; being sent to Siberia by the Russians in July 1940; her younger brother getting scarlet fever; arriving in August 1940 near Yakutsk and Aldan and going to a labor camp; conditions in the camp; the hard physical labor for adults; how in April 1941 the NKVD said mothers and children could leave; their New York relatives getting them Bolivian passports; leaving in May and meeting her father in Lvov (L'viv, Ukraine); going to a farm in country for four months after the German invasion on June 22, 1941; her family following her uncle Joseph Stieglitz to Munkacs, Hungary (Mukacheve, Ukraine); getting Polish Christian papers; going to Budapest, Hungary; going to Szeged, Hungary, where her father had to be hospitalized; the children being hidden in the fall of 1944 in a caretaker’s house in Buda, Hungary; escaping when the Russians arrived and reuniting with her parents; going with her family to Mako, Hungary for four weeks then to Vienna; her parents returning to Kraków; going with a smuggler to Brno, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic) and then joining her parents in Kraków; going with her family to Stockholm, Sweden; going to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in October 1946; going to New York, in February 1951; and getting married in December 195 and having two children.

Regina Spiegel, (née Gutman) born May 12, 1926 in Radom, Poland, discusses her post-war experiences starting with her liberation; traveling with 3,000 other female prisoners by train from Elsnig, Germany to Dachau, Germany; how the train stopped on the way to Dachau because the railway line had been bombed; how the train itself was bombed by the Allies while stopped on the tracks; being able to escape during the bombing; traveling with 15 other women by horse and buggy to Poland; sleeping in German homes while traveling to Poland; avoiding large groups of Russian soldiers; promising her mother and her boyfriend that if they were separated during the war, they would meet in Radom, Poland; how she and her friends boarded a train in Poznań, Poland without any money; meeting a man on the train with whom she had been imprisoned in Pionki, Poland; returning to Radom where she was told that returning Jews were being killed; returning to the Radom Ghetto, where many displaced persons were gathering; writing her name on a list of displaced persons in the Radom Ghetto; traveling from Radom to Kozienice to reunite with her boyfriend, Sam; leaving Poland with Sam and traveling by train to Prague, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic); traveling with the Joint Distribution Committee from Prague to Pilsen, Czech Republic and then to Germany; staying with Sam in the displaced persons camp Föhrenwald; her marriage to Sam in 1946; moving to Stuttgart, Germany, where she learned to be a seamstress through ORT classes; her involvement with the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York; her religious beliefs and how they changed throughout the war; moving to Washington, DC; how she and Sam learned to speak English; working as a seamstress before giving birth to a daughter in August 1951; her thoughts on the Yugoslavian conflict; her work with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum during its early development; her activity with the Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Friends of Greater Washington; returning with Sam to Auschwitz in 1975; speaking publically about the Holocaust; receiving an award from the United Jewish Appeal; and how she and Sam take groups of 16 to 18 year olds to Poland and Israel through the B'nai B'rith Youth Organization.

Charles Stein (né Karl Robert Stein), born in Vienna, Austria, on November 28, 1919, describes his childhood; attending medical school at the University of Vienna; immigrating to the United States and arriving on December 18, 1939; his draft into the army on October 7, 1941; discovering that his parents had gone into the Lodz ghetto; training at Camp Ritchie in Maryland; going to Normandy, France with the 9th Infantry Division as the commander of a prisoner-of-war interrogation team; helping to liberate Nordhausen and interrogating its Ukrainian guards; becoming an Army captain and then the chief of the translation section in the Office of Military History at the Pentagon; serving in Korea and Tokyo for five years; marrying an Air Force lieutenant in Tokyo; returning to the US and settling in Washington, DC; working for the Air Force Intelligence and for the State Department until his retirement in 1978; serving as a foreign service officer and being responsible for the resettlement of refugees in Europe; and writing about his experiences during the war.

Hannah Kalman (née Hannah Finer Kalmanowicz), born in 1912 in Opoczno, Poland and describes her family; moving to Lodz, Poland when she was 12 and joining a Zionist organization; meeting her husband in the Zionist organization and getting married in 1937; moving into the Lodz ghetto in 1939; living with her son, sister, and nephew in a small room with bad conditions; being deported with her family on one of the last transports out of the Lodz ghetto; never seeing her son and nephew again after their arrival at Auschwitz; her transport to Waldeslust, Germany, where she did hard labor; going on a death march to Bergen-Belsen; conditions in the camp; being liberated with her sister on April 15, 1945; the death of her sister two months after liberation; traveling around Poland looking for relatives; reuniting with her husband later in Poland; moving to Germany and having a son; immigrating to the United States; settling in Scranton, Pennsylvania; having a daughter; and living in Israel for a short time but ultimately settling in the United States for medical treatment.

Morris Rosen, born on November 10, 1922 in Częstochowa, Poland, describes his family; being forced to paint rooms for German troops during the war; his deportation to Theresienstadt; being forced on a death march to Buchenwald; receiving help from the Red Cross after the war; traveling around Poland and Germany trying to find his sister; his time spent in displaced persons camps; his memories of the Nuremberg Trials; immigrating to the United States and settling in New York; the mental stress with which he dealt after the war; attending the international law program at Columbia; moving to Baltimore, Maryland in November, 1949; getting married in 1953; collecting items from the World War Two era; and his reflections on the state of antisemitism in today’s world.

Sam Spiegel, born in Kozienice, Poland on August 23, 1922, describes his family and childhood; being forced into a ghetto; his father’s involvement in the underground movement; working for the Judenrat and getting papers to leave the ghetto and get extra food; his deportation to Auschwitz in 1942; meeting his future wife in the camp; the Ukrainian camp guards; conditions in the camp and how inmates helped each other; going on a death march as the Allies neared Auschwitz; returning home and experiencing antisemitism; spending time in displaced persons camps; working for the United Nations Relief Organization and the Joint Distribution Committee after the war; getting married; immigrating to the United States; and returning to Europe to visit the concentration camps.

Fred Gutter, born on December 25, 1926 in Sanok, Poland, describes his family and childhood; his memories of celebrating the Jewish holidays and Sabbath services; attending a high school and experiencing antisemitism; increasing persecution against Jews in the 1930s; moving to Lwów because of the difficulties his family faced; his family’s capture by Russian troops and living under Russian control; being released by the Russians at the end of the war and briefly returning to Sanok; staying in several displaced persons camps; reuniting with his father after the war; receiving aid from the Joint Distribution Committee; spending some time in Palestine and fighting in the 1948 war; immigrating to the United States in 1959; and his feelings about American politics.

Henry Greenbaum, born on April 1, 1928 in Starachowice, Poland, describes his family and childhood; his memories of his family celebrating the Jewish holidays; being too young to understand the persecution that was happening around him; his family deciding that one of his sisters should immigrate to the United States in 1937; the establishment of a ghetto in Starachowice; his deportation to a labor camp in October 1942; attempting to escape but getting severely wounded and having to stay in the camp; his transfers to Auschwitz and then Flossenbürg; going on a death march from Flossenbürg; his liberation by the U.S. Army on April 25, 1945; spending time in a displaced persons camp after the war until his sister in America could send papers for him and his brother; immigrating to the United States in June 1946; adjusting to life in America and finding a job at a department store; settling in the Washington metro area; and interacting with other Holocaust survivors who live in his community.

Ruth Alper, born on February 18, 1932 in Germany, describes her family and childhood; experiencing little antisemitism as a child; her memories of Kristallnacht; receiving an affidavit from family in Detroit, MI in 1939 to immigrate to the United States; arriving in Cuba and staying there until 1941, when she and her family moved to Miami, FL; the small Jewish community in Havana, Cuba; listening to the progress of the war on the radio; experiencing antisemitism in Miami; her recollections of the response of the American Jewish community experiencing the war from abroad; and creating a new life for herself in the United States.

Michael Lin, born in Riga, Latvia on September 14, 1936, describes his family and childhood; the Jewish community of Riga; the beginning of the war in 1941 and his family being forced to leave their home to settle in Yaroslavl (IAroslavl' ), Russia; catching malaria and developing pneumonia in 1941 but not being able to get medication; moving to another small village in Russia, where he remained until 1944 when his family moved farther east; having to shave his head to avoid getting lice; his father’s draft into the Russian Army; the end of the war and preparing to return to Riga; his experiences with antisemitism in Russia; beginning school after the war in Latvia; his draft into the Russian Army in September 1955; attending school in Moscow after he left the army; immigrating to Israel in 1969 with his wife and children; immigrating to the United States a few years later; and his reflections on sharing his memories of the Holocaust.

Chana Kalman, born on January 20, 1912 in Opoczno, Poland, describes her family and childhood; her experiences with antisemitism; moving to Lódz, Poland when she was eighteen years old; participating in a Zionist organization with several other young people; working during the day and attending a Hebrew school at night; getting married shortly before the death of her father in 1937; giving birth to a child on January 25, 1939; moving into the Lódz ghetto in 1940 and struggling to find food for herself and her son; the liquidation of the ghetto in August 1944; her deportation to Auschwitz with her sister and being forced around by SS men; her transfer to Bergen-Belsen shortly before her liberation; finding out about the death of her husband and child; getting remarried in 1946 and having a son and a daughter; remaining in Germany as a displaced person until 1950, when she immigrated to the United States; settling in Scranton, Pennsylvania; spending some time in Israel once her children had grown up; and her reflections on life in the United States.

Dorrit Liane Ostberg, born in Vienna, Austria on September 29, 1929, describes her family; her father fleeing to Paris, France after the Germans entered Austria; escaping to Paris with her mother and sister but discovering that her father had fled to Yugoslavia; arriving in Yugoslavia several months later; obtaining Yugoslavian citizenship and living in Slavonski-Brod and Zagreb (both in present day Croatia); fleeing to Crikvenica, Croatia after Croatian guards arrested her father; her family’s deportation to an Italian internment camp on Rab; attending school until she contracted hepatitis and had to stay in a hospital for four months; her liberation in September 1943; her family fleeing on a fishing boat to Italy and living openly as Jews in Bari, Italy with two Italian women; immigrating to Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York in July 1944; attending junior high school; moving to New York City after the war ended; attending university and becoming a math teacher; getting married three times and having one son; and her religious feelings.

Alice Eberstarkova Masters, born in Trstená, Czechoslovakia (Slovakia) in 1925, describes her youth; her experiences with antisemitism before the war; immigrating to England in 1939 on a Kindertransport; working as a secretary for the Czech government-in-exile in London during the war; following the BBC broadcasts of the war’s progress; the end of the war and discovering that her parents had died in Auschwitz; her reflections on the Nuremberg Trials; participating in Zionist and Jewish organizations while in England; immigrating to the United States in March 1948; working for the International Monetary Fund; losing her religious faith; getting married and starting a family after the war; and telling her children and grandchildren about her experiences during the Holocaust.

Martin Weiss, born in Polana, Czechoslovakia (possibly present day Veľká Poľana, Slovakia) on January 28, 1929, describes his post-war experiences living in Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic with his sister; receiving papers to immigrate to the United States in 1946 and living with a distant cousin; working at a butcher’s shop, so he could support himself; opening his own meat store later in life; eventually deciding to volunteer at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; and not participating much in his faith anymore.

Leonard Gordon, born on June 8, 1925 in Tilsit, Germany (Sovetsk, Russia), describes growing up in Siauliai, Lithuania; his family; attending Jewish grade school and high school; the German invasion of Lithuania in 1941; trying to escape to Russia but instead having to return home and go into the Siauliai ghetto; his family’s transport to Stutthof in 1944; being transported with his father and brother to Dachau, where they worked at Mühldorf; building the German underground airport, Messerschmitt; his father’s proposal that the three of them commit suicide; hearing about the invasion of Normandy; the liberation of Dachau in May 1945; staying in a displaced persons camp in Feldafing and planning to move to Israel; traveling to Italy and studying to be a radio technician; immigrating to the United States; becoming an electrical engineer and serving in the United States Navy; and rediscovering religion after the death of his wife.

Fritz Gluckstein, born January 24, 1927 in Berlin, Germany, describes the end of the war in Berlin; the food and housing shortages; cleaning up rubble from bombings with his father; the difficulties of re-starting his education after the war; immigrating to the United States in January 1948 and settling in the Minneapolis and St. Paul area; becoming a veterinarian; and volunteering for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Brigitte Freidin, born in Augsburg, Germany on June 3, 1930, describes her family and childhood; her memories of Kristallnacht; her father being arrested and sent to Dachau after Kristallnacht; her father’s release and her parents’ decision to try to immigrate to the United States; traveling to England while waiting for permission to go to the U.S.; immigrating to the U.S. in 1941; staying with relatives who were taking in refugees in Washington, DC; losing touch with much of her family left in Europe and then discovering that many had died; participating in American student clubs during the war; working as a salesgirl when she was fourteen years old to help support her family; getting married and starting a family; and speaking about her personal experiences during the Holocaust.

Eva Kristine Belfoure, born on October 1, 1924 in Kraków, Poland, describes growing up in a Roman Catholic home; having many Orthodox Jewish friends in her childhood; teaching Catholic prayers to an elderly Jewish lady who was hidden in her home during the war; exchanging goods and delivering messages in the ghetto; being arrested in January 1942 and being taken to the Nordhausen concentration camp, where she worked in various labor camps; her deportation to the Rathsfeld firm, where she worked as a kitchen aide and remained until liberation; doing translation work in a field hospital in Nordhausen after the war; going to the displaced persons camps in Dora, Heilbronn, and Darmstadt; attending the university in Frankfurt after receiving aid from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency; immigrating to the United States in June 1950 and marrying a sailor in 1953; teaching languages in Baltimore County for twenty-five years; and translating for the Red Cross and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

George Leonard, a concentration camp liberator born on December 24, 1921 in Malden, Massachusetts, describes his childhood; his training in Alabama and California before he and his unit went to England; becoming the company runner, staying close to the captain and lieutenants; translating codes and delivering messages while at war; his memories of the fights at the Siegfried Line; receiving the Bronze Star after being wounded; traveling through parts of Germany along the Czech border and getting ordered to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria; helping to give the victims a proper burial; staying in the Mauthausen area for about six weeks until he went to Spital am Pyhrn, Austria in late July; leaving for America on December 15, 1945; getting married; and teaching at Harvard University after the war.

Kurt Roberg, born May 16, 1924 in Celle, Germany, discusses his childhood; attending a German school where he was the only Jewish student; his father Victor Roberg’s profession as a merchant for the firm Gebrüder Freidberg; his family’s religious practices; Kristallnacht; antisemitism in his hometown; details of German politics of the time; the boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1, 1933; how a retired teacher, Hal Lotheim, taught local Jewish students; the Hitler Youth in his community; his Bar Mitzvah; how his brother, Harry, immigrated in 1936 to Holland, the Netherlands to live with their maternal uncle, Wilhelm Marx; how his father had to close his business in 1937; his mother’s 1938 trip to Hamburg, Germany to visit the American consulate; how his father was sent to Oranienburg after Kristallnacht; his father’s release and experiences in Oranienburg; his journey to Holland to join his brother and uncle; how his mother and father used American visa applications to travel to Holland; how his mother, father, and brother immigrated to the United States from Holland in 1940; German attacks on Rotterdam, the Netherlands; being interned in Holland for his status as a German citizen; being sent out of Rotterdam to Gouda, the Netherlands; how a woman organized transports of children from Holland and Belgium to reunite with their parents; receiving his American visa in January 1941; leaving Holland in March 1941; traveling from Germany to Spain and then to Lisbon, Portugal by train with other children; traveling by American ship from Lisbon, Portugal to the United States; being held on Ellis Island for a month because of visa complications; living in New Rochelle, New York with his family; learning about Pearl Harbor; how he and his brother joined the army in 1943; experiencing antisemitism in the army; his experience in the Pacific during World War II; and his life with his family after the war.

Alfred Schnog, born January 25, 1931, discusses his childhood in Cologne, Germany; growing up in a relatively secular Jewish family on Universität Straße; his relationship with his grandparents who lived in Deutz, a suburb of Cologne; seeing Nazi parades and looking on with interest but feeling unwelcome; being harassed by Nazi Youth on his way home from school with his twin brother, Norbert; seeing signs in businesses barring Jews and learning that few business owners enforced this policy; spending Passover in a Catholic hospital after being injured in a car wreck and being provided with kosher food by the nuns; watching his father throw pieces of a gun into the Rhine when guns were banned for Jews; his father’s metal trade business being taken over by non-Jews; hearing about concentration camps but believing they would primarily affect immigrants (particularly Poles) and seeing Polish children taken out of his classes by the Gestapo; his parents’ search for a way out of Germany and eventual escape to the Netherlands in the summer of 1938; his family’s return to Germany in November 1938 to retrieve belongings; witnessing Kristallnacht from an upper-floor window of the Dome Hotel; his family being taken to jail as they tried to return to the Netherlands after the German borders were sealed, but eventually being allowed to go; attending Jewish school in Amsterdam and learning Dutch; applying to move to the United States and first going by plane to England in Jan 1940, then by ship (the Britannic) from Liverpool to New York City in April 1940; attending school in the United States; speaking Dutch with his brother because they did not want to be associated with Germans; experiencing discrimination in school when his third grade teacher admonished him and his brother for wearing an American flag pin on a holiday when they were not born in America; having his Bar Mitzvah and attending Hebrew school at the synagogue in Regal Park; experiencing antisemitism as his family vacationed in the Adirondacks, finding many signs restricting Jews from staying at hotels; learning that his grandparents had been killed in a concentration camp; graduating from Forest Hill High School and then receiving a degree in engineering from Cornell; going to Korea in 1954 to serve two years in the U.S. Army; starting and running a company; learning that a pair of his father’s cufflinks were given to his father in recognition of his Bar Mitzvah by Claus von Stauffenberg, a German officer who later led an assassination attempt against Hitler; his reflections on the way those who did not experience the Holocaust and WWII view it; his children’s knowledge of his and his parents’ experiences and how it has affected them; and his thoughts on Israel.

Fred Taucher, born on January 29, 1933 in Berlin, Germany, describes his half-brother’s suicide to avoid Nazi concentration camps; the destruction of his father’s store during Kristallnacht; moving to a ghetto in 1938; his father’s inability to leave Germany despite his United State’s citizenship; his family’s relationship with a high ranking Nazi member; his father going into slave labor and then being sent to Auschwitz in 1943; his family’s escape from arrest; living in subway stations to avoid Allied bombings; getting arrested, tortured, and sent to Dachau in April 1945; escaping from the Nazis with some Russian soldiers; his mother’s death during a crossfire between the Germans and the Russians; his 1946 Bar Mitzvah in Berlin; life in Berlin after the Holocaust; his 1946 arrival in America; his decision to join the U.S. Army; his experiences trying to obtain United States citizenship; his life in America as a citizen and his activism in Holocaust survivor networks.

Helen Goldkind, born in Czechoslovakia (near Volosyanka, Ukraine) on July 9, 1928, describes her early childhood; experiencing antisemitism as a child; her recollections of the Nazi occupation of her town in 1944; her deportation to Auschwitz; how her grandfather was beaten to death for not relinquishing a Torah scroll; being sent to work at a munitions factory in Germany; being with her sister when they were liberated by British troops in 1945; spending time in the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp to recover; receiving help from the Swedish Red Cross and traveling to Sweden to recover; immigrating to the United States in 1946 with her sister; finding a job as a secretary in New York City; getting married and moving to Baltimore; the death of her sister and raising her children; and her reflections on the current state of the world.

Inge Katzenstein (née Berg), born March 27, 1929 in Cologne, Germany, describes her family; having to move in with some of her extended family in Cologne after Kristallnacht; attempting to illegally cross into Holland; getting into Holland but immediately being captured and imprisoned; immigrating to Kenya but not being able to leave their home their without permission; attending stenography school to become a secretary; immigrating to the United States in 1951 and settling in Vineland, New Jersey; getting married and raising her children as Orthodox Jews; and returning to Germany twice and getting treated well.

Werner Katzenstein, born in Wallensen, Germany on April 29, 1922, describes his childhood; having to leave school in 1933 after Hitler came to power in 1933; his father going to prison because he was Jewish but getting released after about a week; his father being forced to close down his business; buying property in Holland and immigrating there in 1937; immigrating to the United States in 1939 and settling in Somerville, New Jersey; being considered an enemy alien; registering for the draft and being called to service in March 1944; being sent for basic training to Camp Blanding in Florida; being classified for intelligence and reconnaissance work; joining the 100th Infantry Division in Fort Bragg, North Carolina; his deployment to Europe; going through southern France and the Vosges Mountains; and getting wounded in combat; returning to his platoon in January 1945 and going through Germany; being in combat in Heidelberg; working for the military government; visiting family who had been in Theresienstadt; returning for New Jersey on April 30,1946; and getting married and settling in Washington, D.C.

Fred Goldman, born in Fürth, Germany on September 6, 1915, describes his childhood; his memories of Hitler coming to power; finishing high school and moving to Berlin to train to be a cantor and teacher at a Jewish Teacher’s College; returning to Fürth after three years and moving back in with his mother and sister; immigrating to the United States in January 1939 because a distant cousin vouched for him; arriving in the U.S. with twelve dollars and taking a job as a busboy at a department store in New York; marrying Ruth Schuster, a Jewish women also from Fürth; working in a uniform factory until he was drafted into the army in March 1943; becoming a member of the medical corps but then being transferred into the military intelligence unit when the army learned he was fluent in German; going to Camp Ritchie in Maryland; interrogating prisoners in Europe; staying with the army until March 1946, when he returned to the United States and became a diamond setter; and settling in Silver Spring, Maryland after the war.

Paulette Stessin, born in Metz, France, discusses her family and childhood in France; her parents, who sold clothing in the market; keeping kosher; her understanding of events in Germany in 1938 when she was 17 or 18; her family’s move to Angouleme, France where they thought they would be safe; daily life in Angouleme; her work as a hairdresser in Brive la Gaillarde, France, where there was one Jewish family; being arrested near Brive in April 1944; being transferred to Drancy and then to Auschwitz-Birkenau; her memories of Auschwitz; working on a road hauling stones; “Pitchipoi,” a term referring to the imaginary place they would be sent to and used by the prisoners in Drancy; the addition of a chemical to the women’s soup to suppress their menstrual cycles, which did not work on her; deciding to join her “camp sister”, a Dutch woman in another barrack, who was being deported; arriving at Bergen-Belsen; her memories of the camp; being liberated in April 1945; traveling to Paris; her reintegration at the Hotel Lutetia; and her decision to return to Angouleme.

Margitta Cooper, born on June 10, 1929 in Speyer, Germany, describes her family and childhood; her relationships with her non-Jewish friends; her memories of Kristallnacht; her father being arrested and sent to Dachau after Kristallnacht; her family’s arrest in 1940 and being taken to the Gurs concentration camp; gathering with about 20 other children and being told they were to be sent to the United States; separating from her parents and seeing them for the last time; spending time in a small French town before her immigration; finally travelling to the United States by boat in 1941; taking a train to Baltimore, MD to recover with the other immigrant children; meeting an uncle in New York City; finding out about the fate of her family; settling into life in Baltimore and receiving a job at the Johns Hopkins hospital; and her reflections on what the world knew about the Holocaust.

Erica Eckstut, born June 12, 1928 in Znojmo, Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), describes her family; staying with her sister and brother-in-law at the end of the war; marrying a member of the Czech Army, Robert Kauder, on August 28, 1945; living in Freiwaldau (Jeseník), Czech Republic; how her husband was the big boss (Velitel) in the city, removing Germans from the Sudetenland area; moving to Prague, Czech Republic; having two children over the next few years; how her husband testified at the Nuremberg Trials; the death of her husband in 1957; immigrating to the United States; finally arriving in the United States with her children on April 11, 1960 and being greeted by a swarm of reporters because she was among the first to be allowed to leave Communist Czechoslovakia; attending technology school; living with her sister, her sister’s husband, and their children for a year before getting her own apartment; meeting her current husband in 1962; her diagnosis of lung cancer in 1989; participating in a cancer research study and being one of two survivors of the seventy-five person study; and volunteering at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Tolé Johannes Hendricus Madna, born June 8, 1931 in The Hague, the Netherlands, describes his Indonesian father and his Dutch Protestant mother; living in Holland during the war; the divorce of his parents in 1936; living with his father and a nanny; hiding the infant son, Alfred Munzer, of family friends; the child staying with his family for three and a half years and calling him Bobby; moving to Belgium after the war; and immigrating to the United States.

Henri Dupuy, born June 5, 1920 in Thiviers, France and designated Righteous Among Nations, discusses his anger at the French government and Germany; his decision to join the Resistance; Constantin, nom de guerre Jambard, leader of the Armée Secrète (AS) who formed the Maquis in 1942 in Perigueux, France; how his mother, Helene, hid Maquis members in her home and procured ration cards; joining the police to avoid the draft; guarding the Perigueux Gestapo headquarters and stealing letters stamped “Dordogne,” denouncing French citizens; the November 10, 1943 Maquis attack in Perigueux and roundup and deportation of 350 Jews to Auschwitz; the arrest of the Gruska family and escape of their children; how his mother placed two Gruska sons with rural families and the daughter in a convent; how his mother secured forged identity papers with the complicity of Secretary-General Lafont, joining the Messignac Maquis; Maquis attacks from the woods; the supply of small arms by the Riberac police and by parachute drops; how the Maquis were denounced and attacked by Germans; hiding in Coursac, Dordogne, France and joining the Roland Maquis; a Maquis attack on the Neuvic-Bordeaux train carrying French francs to Germany in July or August 1944; and how the Maquis offloaded the francs in a truck to Saint-Alvere, a resistance center in the Dordogne, to support Maquis families and resistance activities.

Halina Peabody (née Halina Janna Litman), born in Kraków, Poland on December 12, 1932, describes her childhood; taking on a false identity (Halina Litinska) during the war and pretending to be Catholic; hiding in Jaroslaw with her mother and younger sister; being injured on the day of liberation by a hand grenade; being liberated by the Russian Army; living in group homes with her sister after the war; traveling to Italy with her family and staying at a displaced persons camp; traveling to England and then going to Israel in 1957; taking a job at the American embassy in Tel Aviv; marrying a Bulgarian Jew who worked for the U.S. Information Agency; leaving Israel in 1968 with her husband and five year old son; immigrating to Palo Alto, California, where her husband could get a job at the Hoover Institute; moving to Washington, D.C., where Halina’s husband got a job working for “The Voice of America”; getting a divorce from her husband in 1972 and then marrying Richard Peabody; volunteering at the Holocaust Museum; and getting involved with survivor groups such as the Association of Child Survivors.

Marcel Bercau, born October 17, 1920 in Paris, France, describes his Romanian family; restrictions placed on Jews during German occupation; his deportation to Drancy in 1941; working in a locksmith's workshop and remaining in Drancy with his father and brother for a year before they were deported; going to Auschwitz, where he worked as an earth-worker and then as a bricklayer; working in the schlosser-electriker division, which allowed him to find a little bit of extra food; the evacuation of Auschwitz on January 17, 1945; going on a death march with 60,000 other prisoners and traveling through the snow and the cold with no food; arriving in Gleiwitz, Germany (Gliwice, Poland), where they were put in open cattle cars and transported to Oranienburg; how while they passed through Prague, Czech Republic people threw them bread and water containers; how four out of five people died during the transport; the German abandonment of Landsberg, where he was being held; being rescued and taken to Augsburg, where there was a repatriation camp; and returning to Paris to start a family.

Rolph Hammel, born on September 11, 1912, in Karlsruhe, Germany, describes his family; his involvement with a Zionist youth movement; being forced to do military service in 1933 in Dijon; getting scarlet fever; moving to Strasbourg, France and working in a hardware store before starting his own faucet and fixtures business in 1937; being allowed to remain in France because he had inherited citizenship from his mother who was French; working in the DCA during the war; helping to save 70 Jews in Périgueux, France; going to the ORT school; and his reflections on the treatment of Jews during the war.

Norbert Hilsberg, born on September 3, 1914 in Vienna, Austria, describes his family; graduating college and serving in the Austrian military for three months; starting the forms to immigrate to the United States after the Anschluss; his parents’ immigration to Cuba, where they stayed until April 1941, when they attained visas for the United States; receiving his visa in June 1938 and traveling to the United States; living with his uncle in Philadelphia, PA when he arrived; learning about the invasion of Poland; working in the advertising department of the Litz department store in Philadelphia; volunteering for the US Army in February 1941; getting sent to an engineering camp, where he made maps; the attachment of his outfit to the general headquarters in DC; being forced to remain in the US when his unit went abroad because he was not yet eligible for his American citizenship; receiving his citizenship in April 1943 and working on plans for the invasion of southern France and Austria; living in North Africa for nearly a year; being sent to Hawaii; leaving the army in 1945; accepting a job with the war department; and settling in Washington, DC with his family.

Alfred Munzer, born in The Hague, Netherlands on November 23, 1941, describes his family; how his parents debated over having him circumcised; his family going into hiding in May 1942; his father being admitted into a psychiatric hospital and his mother working at the psychiatric hospital as a nurse’s aide; his two older sisters being taken in by a Catholic family; going into hiding with a family friend and neighbor, Tolé Madna; how he played in the backyard and was called Bobby; his parents being sent to a concentration camp on December 26, 1942; his mother surviving the war, working first as a seamstress and later as an electrician; how his father died soon after liberation; the death of his sisters in Auschwitz; immigrating to Brussels, Belgium in 1952 and to the United States in 1958 with his mother; settling in New York where he attended Brooklyn College; going on to attend medical school at the State University of New York, Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn; becoming a lung specialist and interning at several well known-hospitals before doing military service at Andrews Air Force base in Washington, D.C.; and settling in D.C. with his partner Joel Wind.

Maria Myriam Mandel, born 1938 in Czerwinsk, Poland, discusses the assembly of the town's citizens in a square and their deportation; her family's escape through a bakery door; hiding from the Gestapo in granaries, cemeteries, and the woods; her parents’ execution by the Gestapo in 1942; her placement by her parents in a neighbor's home from 1942 to 1947; her new name, Katia Gortak; the kindness of her foster mother and brother; her Catholic education; her antisemitic feelings; the painful loss of her brother and sister who were placed in other families and abandoned; the arrival of the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) at the end of the war; reuniting with her uncles in America and France; her shock at learning she was Jewish; her transfer to a Jewish orphanage in Czerwinsk, where she received a Jewish education; her recollections of antisemitism at the war's end; her life in the orphanage from 1947 to 1949; visits by her foster mother; her bitterness when visits ceased; how the JDC changed her birth date from 1938 to 1937 to allow her to travel alone from Poland to France; her arrival in Paris, France; her refusal to join her uncle in America; and her life in Perigueux, France with her paternal uncle and his family.

Yvonne Mignot de Royere (née Roux), born in Clermont d’Excideuil, France on February, 22, 1925, describes how she and her father, Joseph Roux, saved 21 Jews during World War II; the evacuation of Jews in Strasbourg in 1939; working with her father, who was the mayor; taking in French Jewish refugees; how her work as a municipal clerk gave her access to forms and papers, which she used to provide the Jews with forged identity papers and ration cards; hiding Jews in the village rectory; one of the Jewish women giving birth to her daughter, Arlette Veil, in 1943; she and her father saving several families (last names: Robertso, Schwab, Wertz, and Veil); how three of the families were hidden in the caretaker’s house at the Chateau du Noyer and she helped them secure food; how she occasionally left the mayor’s office unlocked so that the families could secure additional ration cards; living in Excideuil from 1942 to 1944, after which the Jews returned to Alsace to rebuild their lives; staying in touch with the people she helped; and being honored with her father by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among Nations in 1982.

Susan Berlin (née Suzanna Reichman), born on June 22, 1926 in Rožňava, Czechoslovakia (present day Slovakia), describes her family; her childhood in Rožňava; her memories of the rise of Nazi power; immigrating to the United States on August 3, 1939; settling in New York City, where she went to Julia Richmond High School; graduating in 1942 and attending Brooklyn College for her undergraduate degree and the University of Pennsylvania for her master’s degree; graduating in 1947 and moving to Washington D.C., where she got a job in the Army Intelligence Map Service as an Army Intelligence Research Analyst; marrying in 1950 and having three daughters; retiring from the Army Intelligence Map Service to raise her daughters; becoming an art teacher when her children got older; and volunteering at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in the Education Department.

John Bucur, born in Youngstown, Ohio on March 5, 1925, describes his childhood; his Romanian-American parents; the multiracial community he grew up in; graduating high school in 1943 as the valedictorian of his class and receiving a scholarship to Ohio University; enlisting in the Army and being sent to Fort Sill, where he received training to be in Battery B of the 17th Observation Battalion; his first assignment watching a ship off the shore of Omaha Beach in France on D-Day; his unit’s move through England, France, and Germany and then going on a tour of Buchenwald at the end of the war; taking college courses at an American School in Biarritz, France after the war; returning home on December 7, 1945 and being discharged from the army; finishing his degree at Ohio University and graduating in 1948; going on to medical school and becoming a neurosurgeon; having five children with two wives; and moving to Arlington, Virginia to found Fairfax Hospital, Northern Virginia Doctor’s Hospital, and the National Orthopedic Hospital.

Lore Schneider (née Heti Lore Koppel), born on October 10, 1924 in Bochum, Germany, describes her family; seeing the Nazi youth in her neighborhood; observing the Nazi parades from her home on the main street; immigrating to the United States in June 1934; settling in Washington, D.C. and attending public school; obtaining U.S. citizenship in 1939, five years after her family’s arrival; attending college at night and working as a stenographer at the Interior Department during the war; and marrying in 1946 and having three children.

Frank Nathan Liebermann (né Franz Natan Liebermann), born in Gleiwitz (Gliwice), Poland on January 19, 1929, describes his family; celebrating Jewish holidays; immigrating to the United States in October 1938 and moving to Dayton, Ohio, where his father set up his medical practice; his family’s involvement in the Jewish community and helping many European Jews to immigrate to the United States; attending Western Reserve University; meeting his wife during his sophomore year and marrying her soon after he graduated; working for a textile converting firm for many years before retiring and moving to Washington, D.C., where his two daughters had already settled; finding a job at a travel firm; and beginning to volunteer at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum after September 11th, 2001.

Marianne Liebermann, born in Vienna, Austria on October 29, 1929, describes her family and childhood; her education; her father searching for ways to leave Vienna and immigrating to the United States after the Anschluss; her father’s efforts to convince a gentile American family, with whom he had previously done business, to vouch for his family; boarding a train to Cherbourg, France in September 1938 and transferring to the Europa ship, which took them to the U.S.; arriving in New York on October 3, 1938 and living there when the war broke out in 1939; graduating from Barnard University and later going on to get her master’s degree at Adelphi University; marrying Frank Liebermann on November 23, 1950; settling down in Great Neck, New York and having three children; becoming a teacher and spending many years teaching English as a second language; and settling in Maryland.

Thea S. Rips, born in Trieste, Italy on February 24, 1922, describes her childhood; her family moving to Rijeka, Croatia when she was five years old; growing up in a Catholic family but having many Jewish friends; witnessing the persecution of nearby Jewish families; aiding several families in their attempts to escape Italy; wanting to become a doctor and working in a shipyard infirmary in Rijeka; getting a job working on the Marshall Plan after the war in Rome, Italy; being offered a chance to move to the United States and work as an interpreter in 1955; meeting her husband, who she was engaged to for eighteen years before they married in February 1976; going to the United States and living in New York; moving to Washington, D.C.; and the death of her husband in September of 1994.

Andrew (né Andrej) James Glass, born November 30, 1935 in Warsaw, Poland, discusses his early childhood; spending time in his wealthy grandfather's house because of his mother's illness; his grandfather, Jacob, repatriating millions of dollars which had been deposited in Switzerland, New York, and London, back into zlotys in Poland because of a 1939 government decree; hearing planes and bombs exploding in September 1939; his father being forced to clear rubble and fill sandbags; supplying gas to a gentile taxi driver and two families driving east on September 13; going by horse and cart and then by train and on foot to Vilnius, Lithuania; his father getting picked up by a Lithuanian patrol but being released when he agreed with them that President Roosevelt was Jewish; his family receiving three Japanese visas from Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese Consul; paying 600 dollars to get Soviet transit visas; traveling on the Trans-Siberian Railway and arriving in Japan in December 1940; getting three residence visas to the Dominican Republic and a one week transit visa from the American Consul in Tokyo, Japan; sailing on the Kama Kumakara in April 1941 to San Francisco, CA; taking the train to New York, NY and staying there until 1943; immigrating to Canada; re-entering the U.S. under the Polish quota; his father working in a defense plant and his mother working as a seamstress in New York; how he determined to not feel different; working for the New York Herald Tribune, the Washington Post, Senators Javits and Percy, and Cox newspapers from 1974 to 2001; becoming a Fellow at Harvard and the managing editor of The Hill newspaper; and feeling that he is living on borrowed time, that life is precious, and that there is a randomness to who survives.

Renate Fischer Chernoff, born on June 25, 1929 in Breslau, Germany (Wrocław, Poland), describes her early childhood; moving to Racibórz, Poland with her family in 1934; being sent to Berlin, Germany to stay with her grandmother in 1937; her family choosing to immigrate to Canada since her father was a physician; arriving in 1938 and settling in Montreal; moving to New Brunswick; her parents adopting Saul Silvershein, a sixteen year old Polish boy from a displaced persons camp; attending college at Dalhousie University; meeting her husband while in graduate school at the University of Chicago; marrying in New Brunswick in 1953 and moving to Saint Louis, MO where her husband finished his residency and their first child was born; moving to Durham, NC, where they had two more children; and settling in the Washington, DC area in 1980.

Eli Dortort (né Klemfner), born on August 30, 1920 in Zdachov, Galicia, Poland, describes his family and childhood; escaping his hometown a few hours before the Germans invaded; traveling with some Russian soldiers to Kiev, Ukraine and then to Starobielsk (Starobil's'k), Ukraine, where he volunteered for the Polish Army; his unit being sent to Israel, where he deserted and worked in a kibbutz; staying in the kibbutz for a year before he joined the British Army and was sent to Italy; later being stationed in Teheran, Iran and Egypt; returning to Israel after the war and fighting in the War of Independence; staying in Israel until the late 1950s, when he immigrated to the United States; and settling in New York City, where he met his wife and had a daughter.

Hilda Seftor (née Cohen), born in Edinburgh, Scotland on August 21, 1923, describes her family and childhood; finding out about the Nazi invasion of Poland; helping her local Jewish community and finding homes for thirty-five Jewish refugee children; her parents founding the Whittingehame Farm School; teaching the school’s Jewish children how to farm and giving them a traditional education; attending the Edinburgh College of Domestic Science and graduating with a degree in household and institutional management in 1943; working in the Edinburgh school system and later at a wartime nursery preparing meals for children; marrying after the war and immigrating to the United States; having four sons; moving to Washington, DC in 1994; and volunteering at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Felix Nicinski (né Fievish Nicinski), born December 7, 1925 in Lochów, Poland near Lódź, Poland, discusses his early childhood; moving in to the fenced-in ghetto in early 1940; how the Germans bombed their city before entering it; being taken to a work camp in Lienzingen (Mühlacker, Germany) in late 1940 with the other 14 to 18 year old boys to dig ditches; slipping away on a march in the summer of 1941 to work and escape to the fenced-in ghetto in Kalisz, Poland; receiving the false identity of an escaped 27 year old; Kalisz Jews being sent to the Lódź ghetto in 1941; being forced to wear the yellow star and beaten by the German guards; working at an ammunitions plants in Skarżysko-Kamienna for 10 months in 1942; being sent to Dora in 1943 and then to Buchenwald in 1944 for six months; his transfer to Bergen-Belsen in 1944; being liberated by the British on April 15, 1945; living in Bamberg, Germany between 1945 to 1948 and learning how to be a barber; immigrating to Australia in 1948 and living there for ten years; immigrating to the United States in 1958; and marrying another survivor of Bergen-Belsen.

David Brombart, born on August 3, 1933 in Brussels, Belgium, discusses his childhood; the German invasion in May 1940 and being able to attend school until mid-1941; the deportation of his sister, Sarah, and his mother in August 1942; running away from a boarding school in Ikla (possibly Uccle in Brussels) and his father placing him in the home of business clients; going into hiding in Hornu, Belgium but visiting his father, who was in hiding in another city; his liberation in September 1944 and returning to Brussels with his father; finding out that his grandfather was a member of the Jewish Committee which made up lists for the Germans; returning to school at age 11 and learning how to write; serving in the Belgian Army from 1952 to 1954 and becoming the head of the Socialist Democratic Youth until 1958; having a full time job with the Young Socialist Guard and attending international conferences as the Labor Secretary from 1958 to 1964; living in Paris, France from 1958 to 1959; getting married in 1961; being offered a job to direct the African Labor Institute of the American organization AFL-CIO; moving to New York and advising labor movements in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia; becoming Deputy Director of the International Department of the AFL-CIO under Lane Kirkland; and being honored for his international labor work by the governments of Dahomey, Togo, and Senegal.

Gunter Haimann, born on January 26, 1922 in Koblenz, Germany, describes his childhood and family; his parents deciding that it was time to leave Germany in the beginning of 1937, when Jewish children were banned from public schools; immigrating to the United States and living with his aunt in Queens, New York; attending high school and night school to learn English; graduating in June 1941 and finding a job at an auto shop; his draft into the army at the beginning of the war and being trained as an interrogator; teaching interrogating techniques at Camp Ritchie in Maryland; his transfer into the 101st Airborne; going to England and jumping on D-Day and landing in Carentan, France; serving with the 101st for the remainder of the war; receiving a Purple Heart after being wounded in Bastogne, Belgium; not taking religion in to account while he was fighting; jumping onto Holland on Rosh Hashonah in 1944; going into Düsseldorf, Germany; finding Hitler’s stationary and using it to write letters; going to Austria and finding Mr. and Mrs. Goering and speaking with Mrs. Goering; seeing Holocaust survivors walking home; returning to the United States and starting a luncheonette business; and meeting his wife and having three children.

Alfred Julian Lakritz, born on June 1, 1934 in Kiel, Germany, describes his family; narrowly escaping deportation to Poland in 1939 and moving to Antwerp, Belgium and then Marmande, France with his family; experiencing antisemitism from his peers in Marmande; how his father was arrested; speaking with the men who arrested his father many years later, and their regret; being sent with his brother to a Jewish summer camp in Creuse, France in July 1942; going into hiding in various safe houses for two and a half years after leaving the camp; ending up at a convent in Lourdes, France, where they met a Jewish French woman who took them in for the remainder of the war; being placed in a Catholic home in Tarbes with his brother after the war; reuniting with their mother in Marmande and applying for visas to the United States; immigrating to the United States in 1950 and settling in Oakland, CA; attending the University of California at Berkeley; completing his law degree; moving to Los Angeles, CA with his wife, whom he had met in law school; and raising a family.

Rita Rubinstein (née Frieda Rifka Lifschitz), born on December 12, 1936 in Romania, describes her family and early childhood; her father’s draft into the Russian Army; going into hiding in Transnistria, Ukraine in September 1941; her liberation by Russian troops in April 1944; returning to their home in Romania and discovering that her father had died during the war; attending school for the first time and learning Russian and Ukrainian; traveling to Munich, Germany and posing as a Greek refugee; living in the Feldafing displaced persons camp for some time; developing tuberculosis in 1947 and having to go to a sanitarium in Augsburg, Germany; immigrating to the United States with her mother in September 1949 and settling in New York, NY; and getting married in 1959 and starting a family.

Anita Etzyon, born on October 4, 1941 in Boryslav, Poland (present day Ukraine), describes her family and childhood; being one year old when her mother died from tuberculosis; having few direct memories of the war but being told about her family’s life during that time; being taken away to live with a Christian family and getting baptized to better fit into her surroundings; returning to live with her father, who had remarried, after the war; living in a Jewish neighborhood and attending a Jewish school; moving to various cities around Poland with her father and step-mother; being the only Jew in her school in Swidnica, Poland; adjusting to life as a Jew after she had spent four years as a Christian; immigrating to Israel in 1951; learning Hebrew and adjusting to life in Israel; getting married to avoid serving in the Israeli Army; having a daughter; immigrating to the United States with her husband and daughter 1963; settling in Washington, DC and working for a Jewish Day School; and her reflections on being a Jew in the modern world.

Melvin Galun, born on May 10, 1940 in Kowal, Poland, describes his parents’ participation in the Zionist movement; his mother’s stories about Jews being sent away to the camps; going into hiding in the nearby forests; his memory of his family’s liberation by Russian troops; staying in several German displaced persons camps after the war; his early education in the displaced persons camps; participating in Zionist youth movements in the camps; immigrating to the United States in November 1949; his studies in the United States at a Yeshiva school; traveling to Israel after graduating school and working in a kibbutz for a year; and getting married in 1963 and starting a family.

Magdalena Farkas Berkovics, born on July 15, 1919 in Cluj, Romania, discusses her childhood, schooling and musical training in a conservatory; experiencing low level antisemitism; getting married in 1939; living in her house in the Cluj ghetto with other women after the city’s Jewish men had been taken away for forced labor; conditions in the ghetto, including food scarcity and the black market; providing piano lessons to Christian children; being deported in June 1944; terrible conditions in the train car; her arrival at Auschwitz; being separated from her family except for one 25-year-old cousin; how her clothes were taken away and her hair removed; going to Stutthof in August 1944 and then digging ditches in Steinort (Sztynort, Poland), Elbing (Elbląg, Poland), and Groudentz; speaking about freedom with the other women and singing Hungarian songs; being liberated and traveling to Satu Mare, Romania, where Jewish volunteers helped her return to Cluj; how she found Christians living in her house and learned that she was the only survivor in her family; marrying, Zoltan Berkovics, in 1946; the birth of their son, Tiberius, who later changed his name to John Sylvanis because of antisemitism in Romania; how Communists nationalized her house and forced her to pay rent; teaching in the Romanian conservatory for 30 years; immigrating with her husband to the United States in the 1980s; and feeling very grateful for American liberty and democracy.

Sol Mackler, born on January 15,1921 in Poland, discusses his childhood in a small village; visiting relatives in nearby Radom; being forced to live in a ghetto in 1939 with sixteen people in one house; wearing a yellow star; in late 1941 walking seven miles to Pionki labor camp, being given a striped uniform and the number 1058; working in a munitions factory, then laying railway tracks in a tunnel; escaping with four other prisoners to the forest and joining Polish Jewish partisans; being captured by Germans and being sent by train to Sachsenhausen; seeing his sister and her baby there; smuggling his one year old nephew into Pionki to the child’s father, a tailor who made Nazi uniforms; waiting for Russians at liberation; going back to his village and being severely beaten; living in Bad Nauheim displaced persons camp in Germany; working on the black market selling diamonds from Belgium; arriving in the United States in December 1949 after being sponsored by two Jewish Californian wine makers; moving to New York to work and getting married in 1956; working for his brother-in-law; and finding out his parents were executed in Treblinka.

Theresia Bauer discusses her involvement with the League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel), which paralleled the boys’ Hitler Youth (Hitler Jugend); the Soviet occupation of Austria, a time period in which she was constantly hiding from soldiers; and her husband's experience as a prisoner of war in Russia.

Carolina Taitz (née Lena Knoch), born on February 24, 1929 in Russia on a train, discusses her childhood in Viesite, Latvia; having friendly relations with schoolmates in her Latvian public school; how her father, a tree doctor, lost his business and the family house and was temporarily imprisoned as a capitalist when the Russian Communists occupied the town; experiencing a lot of antisemitism; seeing Jews being shot on the street when the Germans came in 1941; being forced to live in the ghetto in Riga, Latvia with five people to a room and little food; getting hit in the eye when a German soldier caught her with a cooked potato; being forced to work in a shoe polish factory from 5 AM to 5 PM; going on a forced march with 30,000 people guarded by German soldiers; seeing and hearing people being shot in a ditch in the Rumbula forest; walking with her mother, sister, and 200 other women to Termini prison; staying on the roof in the cold for two weeks in November 1942 and the birth of a baby, named Termina; going back to the ghetto; dressing as a boy going to work and escaping during a second Aktion when she was 14 years old; taking off her yellow star; being sheltered by a Russian Evangelist priest, Vladimir Michko, and his sister for two and a half years; living in their cellar; going back to Riga at liberation; her mother returning from Auschwitz but dying soon after; attending acting school; getting married and having a daughter; trying for 10 years to go to the United States, and finally getting a visa with the help of Eleanor Roosevelt; arriving in New York in March 1966; working at the New York City Opera for 19 years in charge of costumes, wigs, and makeup for the productions; being widowed twice and moving to Washington, DC in 2008; and still seeing her mother and little brother in her dreams and herself running away from German soldiers.

Helen Schwartz (b. Hela Kirschner), born in 1925, discusses living in the Łódź ghetto in Poland from 1939 to August 1944; working in a laundry in the ghetto; being taken with her family to Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944; being marched from Auschwitz to Stutthof; her liberation by the Russians near Gdansk, Poland; contracting typhus in an outbreak that hit a group of female survivors following liberation; returning to Łódź and reuniting with her sister; reuniting with her brother at the displaced persons camp in Ainring, Germany; immigrating in 1949 to Portland, Maine, where her husband worked in a clothing factory; opening a tailor’s shop in 1954; raising a family; volunteering at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; and speaking at schools in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Irene Silver, born Irena Dynkewicz in Lodz, Poland on January 30, 1933, discusses raising her children in the Jewish tradition, being comfortable with friends who understand the Holocaust experience; her anger with people who ask why victims did not fight back during the Holocaust; being tolerant of strangers after having lived with strangers in the Warsaw Ghetto; her work as a social worker and how it was influenced by her wartime experiences; her sympathy with the civil rights movement; her membership in the Hidden Children group in New York where she feels a common ground; receiving Holocaust reparations which she used to help her children; her view that the world has not learned any lessons from the Holocaust; and her emotion at the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, feeling that the rain at the opening ceremony was the heavens crying.

Herman Taube (né Herschel Taube), born February 2, 1918 in Lodz, Poland, discusses his family; being orphaned by age nine; living with grandparents and later moving to Piyotrkov; attending a yeshiva; being encouraged by a Polish doctor to become a medic; returning to his grandparents in Lodz in 1935 and seeing antisemitic incidents; writing poetry; belonging to a literary society and meeting the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber; working in a military hospital in Alexandrov (possibly Aleksandrów Lódzki, Poland), arranged by Father Jagla, a Catholic priest; joining the Polish Army in August 1939; serving in a medical group that marched to the Bug River where the Soviet Army ordered the group to go to Volodymyr-Volyns'kyĭ, Ukraine to get educated so as to lose their capitalist mentality; accompanying a wounded soldier to Poltawa (Poltava), Ukraine, where an Ukrainian militia man arranged for him to take a new name, Grigori Arionowicz Taube, and live with a Jewish family; going to Samarra (Koibashov or possibly Kuybyshev) and getting more medical training; being sent to Tyumen (Tiumen') in Siberia and working in hospitals and in gulags; in November 1941 going to Tashkent, Uzbekistan and then to Andizhan, Uzbekistan; working in a malaria clinic; leaving the clinic after reporting that people were stealing food from the hospital; going to Seratov, Russia to the Polish Army; being assigned to the Kotsk offensive in June 1944; being badly injured by a mine explosion while riding in a truck; recovering enough by December 1944 and going to Lublin, Poland to the Polish Army headquarters in Majdanek; being assigned to Platte and opening a Red Cross repatriation station where he treated people with typhus; going to Keslin in Bessarabia in June 1945 to acquire more medicine from a CIBA warehouse; meeting a young woman, Susan Strauss, a survivor from Germany and traveling together to Potsdam, Germany; staying in a displaced persons camp in Halle-Merseburg, Germany, where he opened a Red Cross station; meeting a young Auschwitz survivor, Henry Rothfogel; traveling with Susan back to Platte, and getting civilly married and later religiously married; traveling with Susan and Henry in the summer of 1946 to Berlin, Germany with help from the Bricha; adopting a two year old child survivor, Mark; having first child in the Zingenheim displaced persons camp in September 1946; arriving in the United Sates on April 18, 1947 and being interviewed at the pier by the Jewish Daily Forward; going to Baltimore, MD to join Susan's father; writing for the Jewish Daily Forward; traveling to New York, NY to edit a Histadrut yearbook; returning to Baltimore and helping Susan run a grocery store; working for various Jewish organizations; obtaining accreditation as a journalist at the White House and in Congress; and continuing to write poetry, stories, and essays about the Holocaust.

Regine Ginsberg, born on November 19, 1925, discusses her childhood in Brussels, Belgium; her father’s work in the leather industry; religious observances in the household; speaking Yiddish at home and French in school; how her father wired money to Chase Bank in New York in the 1930s; her family abandoning their home in Brussels to travel by train to France; staying with a farmer in St. Gaudens, France; the family’s arrest in St. Gaudens; how her brother and father were sent to a prison near Toulouse, France and then released seven weeks later; how her mother returned to Brussels and brought back Sabbath candlesticks, prayer shawls, tefillin, and diamond jewelry which she used to bribe guards; how her father contacted a cousin in Pennsylvania; being on the last boat out of France from Marseilles; arriving in New York in June 1942; staying with cousins in Pittsburgh, PA and then settling in McKeesport, PA; her mother and father’s work in the leather industry; moving to Texas where she met her future husband Reuben Ginsberg in Athens, TX; her brother enlisting in the army and being sent to Belgium where he did intelligence work acting as a French interpreter; studying along with her husband at Columbia University in New York; becoming an art dealer and opening up a gallery in the 1970s; her emotional state after the war; and how her wartime experiences affected her life, her marriage, and the way she raised her children.

Ursula Guttstadt McKinney, born November 17, 1925 in Frankfurt an der Oder, Germany, discusses her family’s professional and religious background; her childhood and the troubles she faced obtaining schooling due to being half-Jewish; the difficulties her Jewish father and cousins faced; worrying about her father getting arrested; being able to say goodbye to her father when he was taken to prison and subsequently transported to Mauthausen in October 1942; receiving news that her father died; the Third Reich taking ownership of her family’s house; getting expelled from school in October 1942; moving to Berlin, Germany with her mother and sister; the psychological effects of the war, especially the bombings; her limited contact with the underground; working at a convent where there were some hidden Jewish children; her difficulties resuming a normal life after the war; her education after the war; feeling like an outcast because of being half-Jewish; immigrating, along with her sister, to the United States; not wanting to identify as German; her feelings on being a “mischling,” or having a mixed background; not identifying with one religion and being wed in an Unitarian church; and her work as a founding member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Ruth Rappaport, born May 27, 1923 in Leipzig, Germany, discusses her parents, Mendel Rappaport, a Romanian subject, and Helene Rubinstein, who was born in Poland; how her mother’s cousin, also named Helene Rubinstein, was a well-known cosmetics businesswoman, attending an Orthodox Jewish school and an English language school in Leipzig, Germany; her membership in the Zionist youth group, Habonim; her Romanian passport, which did not identify her as a Jew; moving to Switzerland with her family shortly after Kristallnacht; staying in Zurich, Switzerland as a nanny for the Herzog family after her parents returned to Germany; selling nail polish, which her parents sent because they could not send money; being sponsored by her uncle, Carl Rubinstein, who lived in Seattle, Washington to come to the United States; leaving Europe in December 1939 on the Holland American Line boat, the Veendam; her parents’ attempt to leave Germany with Cuban visas; how her father died in Buchenwald and her mother in Ravensbruck, both in 1943; attending high school in Seattle, then the University of Washington, and finishing at Berkeley, majoring in sociology; working after graduation for a Jewish newspaper in Seattle and for the Zionist Emergency Council; working with Bartley Crum for UNSCOP (United Nations Special Committee on Palestine) in San Francisco, CA; working in Israel during the War of Independence in 1948, where she exchanged gunfire with Palestinians; working with Golda Meir; helping establish the Israel Photographic Archives; returning to the United States and working for the Department of Defense as a librarian; living overseas in Okinawa, Japan; Taipei, Taiwan; and Vietnam; and retiring from the government after 19 years.

Edith Langer, born October 4, 1932 in Hamm, Germany, discusses living on a farm; her devout Lutheran mother; memories of the prewar Jewish community in her town; her early approval of Hitler because his support of public works; meeting Hitler as a member of her scout troop; attending a one-room school with 30 children, 10 of whom were Jewish; her father’s offer to hide the families of two of his Jewish customers in her family’s farm house; her mother’s feeling that hiding Jews was the right thing to do as a Christian; her father's murder by the Nazis for hiding Jews; being sent away from her family to work on a farm, where she stayed from 1941 to 1945 and had no contact with her family; being afraid of German soldiers; seeing murdered Jews in the streets; giving food to the Russian prisoners, who were living on the farm; emigrating from Germany to the United States in 1956; becoming an American citizen in 1961; her hope that more Nazis would be tried, including the one who shot her father; her membership in the Methodist Church; and taking part in protests against the American Nazi Party.

Marianne Friedenthal Milkman, born May 13, 1931 in Berlin, Germany, discusses her childhood in Germany; being baptized and raised as Christian to have more opportunities; changing schools and apartments in 1938 because of anti-Jewish laws; her aunt Lotte Friedenthal, who worked with Pastor Martin Niemӧller; her father’s deportation to Sachsenhausen in 1938; traveling to Switzerland in January 1939 and then flying with her sister to England on a Kindertransport in May 1939; living with relatives in Cambridge, England; the arrival of her parents in England and her father’s internment on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien; joining her father on the Isle of Man in May 1940; returning to Cambridge in May 1941, where she remained throughout the war; graduating from high school and Cambridge University; coming to the United States in 1957 to study biology; getting married and living in Iowa for 30 years; settling in Washington, DC; her Jewish identity; and her feeling that her experience during the war made her a stronger person.

Ruth Friedman Cohen, born April 26, 1930 in Mukachevo, Czechoslovakia (present day Mukacheve, Ukraine), describes her life after the Holocaust; her prewar life in Czechoslovakia; her family’s religious beliefs; her family’s deportation to Auschwitz in 1944; her mother and brother’s death immediately after their arrival at Auschwitz; her transfer to Nuremberg, Germany and then Holachov; the painful effects of tuberculosis that she contracted in Holachov; her survival and liberation by the Russian Army; her and her sister’s return to Mukachevo, where they reunited with their father; her time in Budapest, Hungary and Prague, Czech Republic, where she recuperated from tuberculosis; her immigration to the United States in 1948; the various jobs she had to support herself; her marriage in 1952; her education at the New School for Social Research; and her struggle to recover from the damaging emotional and mental effects of the Holocaust.

Phillip Abraham, born August 10, 1931 in Podului-Turkului (Podu Turcului), Romania, describes his prewar life in Romania; his family’s religious beliefs; his childhood in a close-knit Jewish community; his family’s move to Tecuci, Romania in 1940; his father being taken away and then released in 1942; the lack of food available to the population; his education in a Jewish school; his town’s liberation by the Russian Army; his post-war Romanian education; his membership in Hashomer Hatzair, a Zionist youth organization; his time in Israel; his education at Hebrew University and Weizmann Institute, where he studied physics; his immigration to the United States in 1959; his careers at Raytheon and the Office of Naval Research; his marriage in 1964; and his two children.

George Ernest Arnstein, born September 20, 1924 in Stuttgart, Germany, describes his prewar life in Germany; the repercussions of the Nuremberg laws; his experiences with antisemitism; his father’s arrest on Kristallnacht; his father’s time in Dachau; his family’s decision to leave Germany and go to Geneva, Switzerland; his family’s immigration to the United States in 1938; the anti-German sentiment in America during World War II and its effects on him; his service for the United States Army beginning in 1943 and his duties as a crypto-analyst; his work in Germany helping to perform interrogations, monitoring anti-American efforts, and denazification; his return to Wisconsin after the war; his education at Berkeley and Geneva; and his life post-war.

Gertrude Scarlett Epstein, born July 13, 1922 in Vienna, Austria, describes her early life growing up in Vienna; her Czech father’s belief in free thinking; how her family was not religious; her parents’ and older brothers’ experiences during World War I; her Uncle Willie, who became wealthy as a textile factory owner; how she began to notice antisemitism in Vienna when her family moved to a non-Jewish part of town in the 1930s; her father’s and oldest brother’s activities in the socialist movement; her memories of a strike in Vienna in 1934; her memories of the Anschluss; her brothers’ immigration to England; her experience securing visas for Czechoslovakia on the day Hitler entered Vienna; her feelings that her moral code shifted as it became necessary to lie; her father’s arrest and later release from jail in Czechoslovakia; the family’s move to Albania by train; help provided to the family by her Uncle Willie; how she smuggled money out of Austria and Czechoslovakia; her family’s life in Albania from November 1938 to April 1939; the reaction of native Albanians towards Austrian refugees; how the Joint Distribution Committee helped refugees in Albania; her experiences teaching German to Albanians and the Italian consulate; problems she and her mother had in securing passage from Albania to England; brutal treatment she and her mother received from German police at a fuel stop in Germany; her memories of learning about concentration camps in 1943 or 1944; and how she tracked down an Albanian family to whom she taught German.

Matilde Neuwirt, born December 26, 1930 in Belgrade, Serbia, describes her early life in Belgrade; how her parents spoke Serbo-Croatian and Ladino at home; her family’s upper-middle class lifestyle; her schooling at both a public and a Jewish school; the lack of apprehension she felt in the pre-war years; her mother’s decision that the family leave Yugoslavia in the summer of 1940; her family’s escape westward through Dubrovnik, Croatia and then to Italy; how her parents smuggled money out of Yugoslavia; her family’s arrival in Italy without visas; living in Vicenza, Italy; how her family was moved to a detention camp in Sandrigo by the Italian authorities; the unofficial schooling that families set up for the children in Sandrigo; how the Italian authorities encouraged families to leave Sandrigo when Italy capitulated to the Germans; the help Jewish families received from a government official to get false documents; her family’s experience traveling to Rome, Italy; her memories of German brutality on the streets; how she did not know what was happening to Jews elsewhere in the country nor the rest of Europe; her brother’s return to Yugoslavia to fight with Tito’s partisans; the anti-Jewish sentiment of the partisans; her brother’s disappearance and the lack of information about him from the Yugoslav government; her family’s decision to emigrate from Italy to the United States in 1949; her family’s arrival in New York, NY; her feelings about Americanization and leaving memories of Europe behind; her memories of the Eichmann trial; her experiences returning to Yugoslavia and Italy after the war; and her belief that her family was lucky in the way they lived through the war.

Susanne Klejman Bennet, born August 11, 1938 in Warsaw, Poland, discusses her memories of entering the Warsaw ghetto; seeing the brick walls being built in the ghetto; living with her grandparents, aunts, and uncles all together in one apartment; beggars asking for food in her building; how her father, a successful art and antiquities dealer, arranged with a non-Jewish friend to have a Polish policeman take her out of the ghetto to a farm in the countryside; how, just before the destruction of the ghetto, her mother escaped from her work group and hid with nuns who gave her a habit and a new name; how the nuns were later rounded up, but were saved on the train platform by a Catholic commandant; how her father escaped from the ghetto through the sewers right before the uprising and went into hiding throughout Warsaw; how as a young child, she knew not to talk about her parents; seeing the red sky in the distance when Warsaw was burning in 1944; her reunion with her parents; the death of most of her relatives during the Holocaust; moving with her parents to Stockholm, Sweden in 1947; receiving visas in 1949 from the Swedish ambassador to Mexico where she and her family stayed for nine months; immigrating to the United States in 1950; living in New York where her father opened up a store off of Fifth Avenue and became a major art dealer with John and Robert Kennedy, the Rockefellers, the Fords, and Greta Garbo as his clients; attending Wellesley College, where she received a masters in library science; meeting her husband Douglas Bennet, who later worked for Hubert Humphrey, Senator Abe Ribicoff, and was an Assistant Secretary of State, head of US AID and NPR, and president of Wesleyan College; their eldest son, Michael, a United States senator from Colorado; their second son, James, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Monthly; their daughter, Holly, a financial adviser; her feelings when visiting Germany with her husband; how her father never spoke about his wartime experience; and how she has only recently started talking about her childhood during the Holocaust.

Marianne Roberts (née Marianne Cohn), born June 20, 1920 in Ludwigshafen, Germany, discusses her childhood in Ludwigshafen; experiencing antisemitism; her father's death from tuberculosis in 1933; her expulsion from school with her sister, Lottie, because they were Jewish; her mother's death in 1936; being photographed at the City Hall to show her "Jewish left ear" and being given the name ‘Sarah’; living with her sister until Kristallnacht; hiding in a basement for three days with no food while their apartment was being destroyed; moving into her sister's fiancé’s family's house for a few months and never going outside; going to the American Consulate to get visas their mother had applied for three years previously; leaving Germany in early 1939 with 4 dollars, pots and pans, and a family ring; sailing on the Cunard White Star to New York, NY; working in a doctor's office in Brooklyn; getting married and having two children; and speaking for past 20 years in schools and colleges about her wartime experiences.

Harry Markowicz, born August 9, 1937 in Berlin, Germany, discusses his childhood in Antwerp, Belgium; being hidden during the war with the Coons family in Brussels, Belgium, then in a children's home, and then in the Von der Linden's house under the name Henry Von der Linden; his parents who lived in hiding with another couple; how his father did not go outside for two years while in hiding; his brother, Mani, who was saved by Father Joseph Andre; how his mother found him after liberation; the removal of Allied flags at the time of the Battle of the Bulge because of fear that German forces would make their way to Brussels; arriving in the United States with his parents in March 1951; settling in Seattle, WA and going to high school and the University of Washington; traveling to Paris, France for a year for training as a French teacher; traveling to Israel to learn Hebrew; teaching French in Tacoma, WA; learning sign language and working at Gallaudet University for 29 years; feeling more comfortable among Holocaust survivors; and volunteering at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where he feels a bond with the other volunteers.

Julie Keefer (née Jula Weinstock Eisen), born on April 19, 1941 in Lvov, Poland (present day L'viv, Ukraine), discusses her family’s forced relocation into the Lvov ghetto; the escape of her grandfather, Aiski Eisen, from a camp in Janov; her grandfather finding help from Mr. Borecki, who told him in late 1943 that the ghetto was to be burned, and her grandfather’s rescue of her family from the ghetto; her memories of a tunnel or bunker in the forest, to which a few dozen people were smuggled out of the ghetto; her memories of her grandfather donning a Nazi uniform to smuggle people out of the ghetto; being taken out of the bunker because she and her baby sister, Tola, were endangering others by crying; being placed with Mrs. Szwarczynski, a Catholic woman; the arrival of the Russians in Lvov in June 1944; staying in three displaced persons camps in 1945; living in Camp Taylor in Linz, Austria; traveling alone at seven years old to the United States, where she lived in a series of Catholic orphanages, seeing relatives on weekends; being called a Nazi because she spoke German; being sent by the Joint Distribution Committee to the Bellefaire Jewish Children's Orphanage in Cleveland, OH; her adoption by Fred and Tea Klejstadt; attending Oberlin College; getting married and earning a graduate degree in education; feeling grateful to United States; and her desire to find out what happened to her hidden sister whose name became Antonina Noviska.

Erica Laufer, born May 11, 1930 in Klagenfurt, Austria, discusses being the only Jewish child in her school, where she was taught by nuns; her mother denying her Jewish identity but her father being observant; an appearance by Hitler after the Anschluss; being forced to wear the yellow Star of David; being barred from attending school; moving into her grandfather's apartment in Vienna, Austria and living there in secret; SA attacks on Jewish homes; witnessing the events of Kristallnacht while hiding in a doorway; how her father obtained tickets to Trinidad; sailing on the Dutch ship Cotica with other refugees; establishing a life in Port of Spain, Trinidad; being forced, as refuges, to live in a detention center after England entered the war; going to a boarding school to be the companion to the daughter of the director; sailing to New York, NY with her parents in December 1940; moving to Washington, DC where she was discriminated against by other children because of her accent; her academic success; her work for the federal government; getting married and starting a family; not raising her children as Jews following an oath to her mother; the number of relatives she lost in Europe; and her attempts to suppress her feelings about the Holocaust.

Barbara Goldberg, born in 1943 in Wilmington, DE, discusses her parents, Emma and Erich, who received visas from the Portuguese diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes to emigrate from France to Portugal; their journey over the Pyrenees to Spain and then to Portugal; their arrival in the United States; her uncle Paul Brennan (born Pavel Briess) who had been in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz; how other relatives made it to Palestine, Australia, and South Africa; speaking only German in the house; how her parents’ personalities were shaped by the war; never discussing the past or other relatives' stories; feeling a connection to refugees; living with the memory of the Holocaust; and her discovery later in life that Aristides de Sousa Mendes had helped her family.

Liselotte Epstein Ivry, born July 21, 1925 in Lichtenstein, Czechoslovakia (possibly present day Lichtenstein, Saxony, Germany), describes her family, including her father Victor Ivry, mother Elsa Sicher, and younger brother Hans; the large families on both her father’s and mother’s sides; having heard of Hitler at age 12; being taken by truck with soldiers to live with relatives in a nearby village and then by train to live in Prague, Czech Republic; the many changes after the Germans marched in on March 15, 1939; having been set to go to Great Britain in 1939 on the Kindertransport but instead being sent first to a children’s facility in Prague and then to a private home; being sent to Terezin September 9, 1942 to work as a nurse in the hospital; the transport and death of her mother and brother on March 8, 1944; being sent on December 15, 1943 in a cattle car to Auschwitz, to Block 11; being given number 70663; how the will to live was what kept you alive; being sent to Hamburg, Germany to work first in a sand pit, then as a train switcher, and finally as a brick-maker; how their camp was bombed and they were moved to Bergen-Belsen; the ensuing chaos and then the emotion and celebration after being liberated by the British; eventually going to Canada in 1949 to stay with her uncle; marrying in 1950 to a Lithuanian, Sydney; her children; her attitude about Germany now and forgiving but not forgetting; her book, I Am Their Voice, which is a collection of poems, letters, and anecdotes by children from her 25 years as a speaker; and how now she is doing research for a work about Madeleine Albright.

Hans Ziegler, born June 12, 1925 in Brno, Czechoslovakia, discusses being raised as a Christian with a Jewish father; his parents divorcing in 1934; his father’s factory going out of business in 1937; attending a German elementary school; his father’s deportation to Terezin (Theresienstadt concentration camp) in 1942; being transported to Berlin, Germany in 1943 for forced labor; being sent in September 1944 to Postelberg (Postoloprty), Czech Republic; escaping in April 1945 with two others to the woods; hiding in Brno until the Russians arrived; getting repatriated and going to university for three years; being expelled by the Soviets in 1949 because his father was a capitalist and a diplomat; being in the military for two years; being employed as a chemist in an armaments factory; working in Egypt and Afghanistan; escaping to Germany in 1970 and staying until 1983; going to the United States and working in Warren, Ohio until 1990; going back to Germany; feeling more Jewish than Christian; and how he thinks more about his father and his war-time experiences.

Guenter Lewy, born August 22, 1923 in Breslau, Germany (Wrocław, Poland), discusses his childhood in a large extended assimilated family; his memory of seeing Hitler at the 1936 Olympics; belonging to a Jewish Zionist youth group; being attacked on a hiking trip by German storm troopers; his father’s three month imprisonment in Buchenwald after Kristallnacht; going with Youth Aliyah via Trieste to Palestine in March 1939; being met in Haifa by his uncle; living on Kibbutz Tzarad where he worked as a shepherd; his parents’ escape to the United States in late 1941; volunteering in early 1942 for the Palestine Regiment of the British Army; joining the Jewish Brigade and being stationed in Egypt; traveling to Italy with Montgomery's 8th Army in late 1944; traveling to Holland at the war’s end; his role in organizing illegal immigration to Palestine; interrogating German civilians in Berlin; returning to Palestine; traveling to the United States to see his parents in late 1946; graduating from college in 1951 and earning a Master's and Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1957; teaching at Columbia, Smith College, and University of Massachusetts; teaching in Germany from 1961 to 1962; his feelings about German people today; the strong influence of his youth group on his resilience; his writings on the moral dimensions of history and the Nazi persecution of the Romani peoples; his current interest in writing about Holocaust perpetrators; reoccurring dreams about Nazis brutality; and feeling that some of the best Holocaust scholarship has being written by contemporary young German scholars.

Malvy Solomon (née Aizic), born in 1938 in Bacau, Romania, discusses pre-war violence against Jews; her father’s conscription into forced labor for the Romanian military in 1941; living with her mother and grandmother in the ghetto with little food; her father’s return in 1944; attending a Jewish primary school and learning Hebrew; surviving bombings; the Soviet arrival in Romania at war’s end; Soviet looting after the war; her school’s closure by Soviet authorities; post-war antisemitism and anti-Capitalist feelings; her father’s job working for the communist government after he was forced to close his store; finishing high school at 16; her medical schooling and career; her marriage; immigrating to Israel in 1961; attending medical school in Tel Aviv; getting divorced, treating soldiers and bombing victims; remarrying in 1971; immigrating to the United States; her education in the U.S.; working for the Department of Veterans Affairs; and her feelings about the war, communism, and her life.

Elia Miranski, born on August 3, 1922 in Mir, Poland (present day Belarus), describes growing up in a poor, moderately religious family but experiencing no antisemitism until the German invasion in 1939; his parents’ deaths in the first few days of the occupation; escaping with his brother, Israel, from the ghetto which had been set up in a castle; joining Russian partisans in the forest; blowing up railroad tracks for two years; trains near Valozhyn, Belarus; planes dropping supplies; others taking the wounded away from the front lines; Russians mobilizing all partisans into the army; being wounded by the Germans; traveling back to Mir after the war; working on a dairy farm for seven years as a supervisor; moving to Minsk, Belarus and working as a house painter; getting married and having a daughter; going to Israel in 1972 and then to the United States in 1995; thinking day and night about his wartime experiences; and going back to Mir from Israel for a memorial ceremony in the cemetery.
Genia Miranski, daughter of Elia Miranski, adds to her father’s interview by translating it into English and by describing Elia’s membership in the Zionist youth group Hashomer Hatzair; Elia’s parents and two younger siblings being shot by Germans; Elia building bridges and roads; witnessing his friend being mauled to death by a dog; living in the castle ghetto; Elia’s experience escaping and hiding in a swamp for three days and at times breathing through a straw when German dogs were nearby; joining Russian partisans; his return to Minsk at the end of the war and experiencing a significant amount of antisemitism; the Six Day War in Israel; going to an underground bakery at night to get Passover matzo; arriving in Israel in 1972; living in underground bunkers in 1973 during the Yom Kippur War; and her own arrival in the U.S. in 1985 and her parents’ arrival in 1995.

Maria Kordalewski, born April 13, 1924 in Poland, describes her Ukrainian parents and her two siblings, Nicolai and Nadja; going to school and her Jewish friends; the Russians coming in 1939 and the subsequent food shortages; how people were being sent away to Siberia; the absence of antisemitism in their small town until the German occupation in 1941; how her family hid two boys until the boys escaped; how her brother was arrested in 1942, along with other young men, as a means of preventing an uprising; the Russians coming in 1945 when the war was over; being sent with her sister to Lvov (L'viv, Ukraine) to get away from the communists; being sent to a displaced persons camp in Regensburg, Germany and going to school to study pharmaceuticals; arriving in the United States in 1950 by herself; landing in New York City, NY; the various jobs she held at first; moving to Detroit, MI then to California, and finally to Miami, FL; and her feelings that the Holocaust should never be forgotten.

Alan Wood Lukens, born February 12, 1924 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, discusses the men in his family who served in the military; attending Princeton University in 1942; volunteering for the 10th Mountain Ski Division in Colorado at Camp Hale in March 1943; being assigned to the 20th Armored Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky in artillery in 1944; sailing to Le Havre, France in early 1945; going through Holland, Belgium, and seeing combat in Germany; crossing the Rhine River as part of the Third Army; experiencing heavy fighting in April 1945; becoming part of the Seventh Army; arriving at Dachau and his memories of the conditions of the concentration camp; his disgust with the actions of German soldiers in an Austrian village during the summer of 1945; returning to Princeton University and graduating in 1948; going into Foreign Service and serving in Europe and Africa; losing family in a plane crash in 1961; remarrying; being appointed ambassador to the Congo from 1984 to 1987 and then retiring; and returning to Dachau in 1995 and 2005 and then in 2010 as president of the 20th Armored Division.

David Leib Schnitzer, born in 1924 in Oswiecim, Poland, discusses his childhood; his family; his father’s concrete factory and how the equipment was confiscated by the Nazis in 1939; experiencing anti-Semitism at the public school; his father being attacked; hiding in a basement on September 1, 1939 because of the bombings; going by truck with his family to Kraków; returning to Oswiecim and volunteering in place of his father to clean up the old Birkenau army barracks as ordered by the Judenrat; wearing a yellow armband; seeing Heinrich Himmler; being sent to the Sosnowiec ghetto in early 1940; being deported to Blechhammer in 1941; conditions in the camp; being sent to Annaberg, Germany in 1942 and working on the autobahn; eating grass due to hunger; being sent to Graditz, Germany; having typhus; felling trees; being forced to walk to Langenbielau (a subcamp of Gross-Rosen) in early 1945; working on airplane parts; the SS guards running away in May 1945; being afraid to move until the Russians liberated the camp; staying on an estate guarded by Russians and recuperating; reuniting with his sisters and mother; staying in a displaced persons camp near Frankfurt; immigrating to the United States; working in the garment district in New York; and the continuing to be psychologically effected by his experiences in the Holocaust.

Rose Silber Kamin, born in 1928 in Warsaw, Poland, discusses her parents; growing up in a secular home; the Germans bombing in September 1939 and seeing people pray in the basement; being frightened of the German soldiers on motorcycles; standing in a bread line where she met a doctor who arranged for her family to get to the Russian border; staying in a small village for two years; attending school until the June 1941 bombing; going by train to the Ural Mountains; living with four Jewish families; her father leaving to work as a tailor for the Russian Army; her brother being sent to mine coal in Siberia; her father getting typhus and returning home; going by cattle car to Siberia to join her brother; living in one room underground; attending school for four years and working in a barber shop cutting soldiers' hair; getting sick; going back to Poland after the war; going to a displaced persons camp in Hessisch-Lichtenau, Germany; taking clothing design courses; getting married in 1947; living in the same room with her parents; going to Montreal, Canada in 1948 with her daughter and husband; being proud to be a Canadian; and getting depressed when she thinks about the war.

Sarah Racimora Ludwig, born on in 1940 in Radom, Poland, discusses her parents being taken to the Pionki forced labor camp; living in the Radom ghetto with her uncle, a member of the ghetto police; leaving the ghetto in 1942 and being hidden in a potato sack on the back of a truck; joining her parents in Pionki; hiding when she heard the German guards; her father working in the camp kitchen; the liquidation of Pionki in August 1944; being sent to Auschwitz with her parents; being tattooed and going to the Kinderhaus (children’s house); her mother being sent to Czechoslovakia and father to Dachau; her grandparents dying in Auschwitz; being liberated by the Russians; being taken to a Kraków orphanage; her mother finding her, which is her first childhood memory; going to Belgium for two years then to Israel; immigrating to the United States in 1953; being embarrassed by her tattoo and having it removed in high school; still being fearful of dogs; and her work speaking to school groups about her experiences.

Rosa Grundberg Weinstein, born in 1935 in Vienna, Austria, describes her childhood; her parents’ grocery store; being frightened when hearing German boots on the pavement; her father taking apart grocery shelves to make trunks for people who were leaving; her father being beaten by Gestapo; their store closing in 1938; getting food at the soup kitchen; getting passage to Trieste, Italy in October 1939; her mother packing the silver, candlesticks, and a duvet; sailing on the Saturnia and watching over two Viennese boys; her father studying English from newspapers on the ship; arriving at Ellis Island, where her mother was forced to strip; going to Taunton, Massachusetts; living in a tenement in Fall River; feeling different in public school; the sad atmosphere in the house; her mother’s death in 1947; becoming Americanized by her teens; getting married; going to Boston University; moving with her husband to New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.; having children; still feeling uneasy when she hears marching sounds; straddling two cultures; and feeling survivor’s guilt.

Renate Mann (née Wollstein), born in Berlin, Germany on April 4, 1927, describes moving to Katowice, Poland in 1931 when her parents divorced; having a normal and happy childhood; becoming aware of the Nazi party in 1938 as party members were being chased by townspeople; moving to Krakow, Poland after the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939; being evicted from her home by the Nazis and moving to a suburb of Krakow where she, her mother, and stepfather lived in one room in a farmhouse; being forced to move into the ghetto at Krenau (Chrzanów), Poland after her mother died and her stepfather had been sent to a concentration camp; being sent first to Auschwitz in 1941 and then Hansdorf, a labor camp where she worked long days with 150 women in a factory making thread; the food situation at the next camp she was sent to as “too much to die from, too little to live on”; the day of liberation by the Russians on May 8, 1945; returning to Katowice and her stepfather putting her on the children’s transport to England in March 1946; staying in England until 1951, working as a domestic; going to New York, NY in 1956 and working for a gun wholesaler until moving to Toledo, OH, where she lived for 55 years; and how her experiences during the war have made her value human life and friendships much more, in spite of all the serious health problems she’s had that have limited her.

Hans Nathan Tuch (born on October 15, 1924 in Berlin, Germany) discusses his childhood; going to Catholic school; his father’s death in 1936; seeing Jesse Owens perform at the 1936 Olympics; being expelled from gymnasium and going to Jewish gymnasium in 1938; not being fearful of German soldiers though beaten up by other boys; getting a visa and affidavit from his mother's relatives in Kansas City; going by boat alone in September 1938 with his collection of opera programs; arriving on October 17 and living with Kansas relatives; having sympathetic high school teachers; being reunited with his mother in August 1941; starting college and working two jobs in 1942; getting drafted in May 1943; having basic training in Alabama; unloading ships in New Orleans; applying for specialized training but getting rejected because he was considered an enemy alien; becoming a citizen; going to the University of Illinois; being sent to Camp Ritchie in Maryland to Army Intelligence School for six weeks along with other German Jewish refugees; going by troop ship to England in March 1944; joining the 101st Airborne Division to become an interrogator; parachute jumping into Carreton, France near Omaha Beach two hours before the D-Day invasion to keep German replacements from coming in; being in combat for nine days; interrogating German prisoners; jumping into Enthoven, Holland on September 17, 1944; being in the Siege of Bastogne on December 15th and liberated on December 25th; going to Berchtesgaden (Hitler's Eagles Nest) and then going to Austria and Paris, France; going to the United States on December 8, 1945; graduating from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies; going back to Germany to work in cultural and political affairs in Frankfurt; working for five years at the America House in Frankfurt for the U.S. Information Agency; studying Russian at the CIA in Washington; working in Moscow, Russia as the cultural and press attaché; being an assistant to Edward R. Murrow for three years at USIA; being sent to Sofia, Bulgaria as DCM and then head of the legation; being the public affairs officer in Berlin for three years; becoming acting Deputy Director of the Voice of America for three years; retiring after five years in Brazil; and feeling that he is an American of German origin.

Alice Schachter Barzilay, born November 3, 1926 in Vienna, Austria, discusses her upper-middle class childhood with her younger sister Ruth; going to public school with non-Jewish friends; ice skating and skiing; observing Jewish holidays; being seated in back of class after the Anschluss in March 1938; feeling in danger on the streets; reading signs on benches; being frightened at the sound of the German soldiers' marching; being expelled from school; going to a Jewish gymnasium in September 1938; how her father’s textile business was taken over; hearing screams on street during Kristallnacht; an Aryan friend warning them to leave by December; how her father and sister left December 31 for Switzerland and then went to England; how she and her mother received affidavits from her father's cousin, which enabled them to leave in March 1939 for London, England; receiving help from the Joint Distribution Committee to go to Cuba on the boat, Orope; going to a suburb where her father imported textiles and paid her private school tuition in fabrics; seeing the St. Louis ship in the harbor; being a part of the large Jewish community from Germany and Italy in Havana; waiting 18 months for United States immigration papers to come through; sailing to Key West and then to New York City and arriving in September 1940; living in Lakewood, NJ and then Washington Heights, NY; finishing high school in two years; graduating Phi Beta Kappa from New York University; marrying in 1955 to a New York Times journalist, Robert Barzilay, and having two children; not joining groups after seeing the mass eruptions in Vienna and marches en masse; how she receives reparations; and her lack of desire to go back to Austria after she made one visit.

Agnes Weisbrun Hoffman, born in Budapest, Hungary on January 21, 1931, discusses her childhood in Miskolc, Hungary in a family of writers and actors; having many relatives in Ricse, Hungary, including her uncle, Adolph Zukor, the film mogul who immigrated to the United States and founded Paramount Pictures; living in a mixed neighborhood with three sisters; having non-Jewish school friends; working for her father in his movie theater; hearing from Austrian relatives of difficult times; how food became scarce; going into a shelter during bombings; how her father was taken away to a camp in Hungary and then to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen; living in a brick factory for two weeks in June 1944; going with her sisters, mother, and grandmother in a cattle car to Auschwitz; being separated from them and how they did not survive; how a guard saved her because of her blonde hair and blue eyes; being sent to the showers; being given a long white summer dress, which she used in pieces in the latrine; living with 1200 women in a barrack; carrying bricks and becoming weak from a diet of coffee, green soup made from grass and dirt, and bread and jelly at night; being a messenger for the SS women because she spoke German; marching with no food to the Weiswasser ammunition factory (possibly in Gross-Rosen) with her friend, Blanca; living in a house with bunk beds and indoor plumbing; marching through the city to the factory in the early morning to straighten twisted wires for airplane parts; working in other factories, one of which was in a salt mine; still wearing the same dress though being dirty and having lice; being taken to Hamburg, Germany and not believing Hitler was dead and the war was over; going to Denmark and then to Sweden; staying in a hospital; going to a boarding school in Helsingborg, Sweden; waiting for five years until her relatives saw her name on a list; how they sent her a ticket to sail on the Queen Elizabeth to the United states; living with her relatives in New York, NY and having a job counting buttons; working for Scandinavian Airlines because she spoke Swedish; becoming a commodities broker in Chicago, IL; having four children; getting reparations; feeling she is more loving to people because of what she went through; and by chance meeting Blanca on the street in Chicago many years later.

Trudy Wellisch Schonberger, born May 20, 1926 in Vienna, Austria, describes her childhood in Wiesenfeld, Austria at the foot of the Alps; how her father had a general store for local farmers and peasants; how she and her older brother, Eric, were the only Jewish children in the town; walking a mile to school in the next town; going later on to a school in Traisen, Austria with her cousin Lily; going to gymnasium in Vienna and living with her parents' non-Jewish friends; seeing pamphlets thrown down from German planes during the Anschluss in March 1938; being expelled from school one week later and going back to school in Traisen; how their teacher was expelled after telling them to say "Good morning" instead of "Heil Hitler"; having no Gentile friends; how her brother was valedictorian but was not allowed to attend graduation; coming home for lunch on November 10, 1938 and seeing her uncle in a police wagon and Lily's mother in a group of 10 women in a house; walking back to Wiesenfeld and seeing her mother on a bicycle; learning that her father and brother were in jail; how her mother organized women to get clothes and suitcases; how the Gestapo ordered them outside to a factory and her mother persuaded a Nazi guard to let the women return to her house instead; how Eric went to the United States in December 1938; how her father lost his business; being permitted to live upstairs in their house with 10 people; how her brother wrote to President Roosevelt, whose press secretary responded three weeks later with instructions to say that his father was a farmer and knew about agriculture; receiving a visa; not being able to say goodbye to Lily and her mother, both of whom did not survive; sailing on the Volendam from Rotterdam, Netherlands in August 1939; living in Queens, NY, then New Jersey; graduating from high school; working for a biophysicist at Columbia University; marrying in 1947; feeling American but Viennese musically; being angry over loss of her people and losing a part of her childhood; and feeling a great connection to survivors.

Rose Liberman (née Szternberg), born on July 27, 1927 in Kielce, Poland, discusses her childhood; losing her mother in 1933 and being sent to live with her aunt and uncle in Sosnowice, Poland; attending public school and Hebrew school; not experiencing any antisemitism before the war; moving into the ghetto in 1940; wearing a yellow star on her arm; having little food; sweeping snow off the streets, cleaning toilets, and working in a factory sewing German uniforms; going in 1942 with other girls in black buses at night to Srodula for a few days and then to Ober Altstadt in Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), where the lagerführer was Irma Hoffman; sleeping on a straw mattress; standing outside for appel; wearing the star on her arm and on the back of her blue uniform; wearing wooden clogs and walking 10 km to the factory, where she spun wet yarn onto big heavy rolls and put them out to dry; a pregnant woman giving birth and then smothering the baby; the women supporting each other emotionally and physically; bombs falling and going into tunnels in the mountains for protection; being liberated on May 9, 1945; going by truck to Reichenbach, Germany and registering; going to Agudah, a religious organization for food, lodging, and clothes; meeting her husband, Alek, who was from Lodz, Poland; learning English from a British professor; going to Sweden with Alek and relatives on a coal boat, lying for two days on top of coal that gave off fumes; arriving in Helsingborg, Sweden, then going to Halmstad, Sweden and registering with police as Holocaust survivors; living with a Swedish family; working in a blouse factory; learning Swedish; getting married in 1949; learning how to type and working in a bank; having a son; immigrating to the United States with the help of the Joint Distribution Committee; settling in San Francisco, CA and having a daughter; going to business college and becoming a payroll clerk; visiting Israel; her husband’s death in 2009; being thankful for the U.S. but dreaming of her lost family very often; and, though she smiles and sings with others, she is sad by herself.

Harold Samuel Cohen, born on June 26, 1924 in Coney Island, New York, discusses his childhood; his Zionist parents; his mother dying in 1938; becoming a diamond cutter after his high school graduation and going to Brooklyn College at night; getting drafted in January 1943 and going to Camp Grant in Illinois for five months for medical training and experiencing antisemitism there; going to a basic engineering program at the University of Chicago for nine months; being sent to Keesler Airfield in Biloxi, Mississippi for pilot training in the Army Air Force for one month; going back to Camp Grant in late 1943 and getting assigned to the 170th General Hospital; sailing on a hospital ship to England; landing on Omaha Beach in France 10 days after D-Day; setting up a hospital camp at Le Mans, France to serve military patients; getting stationed on a hospital train going to Paris, France; getting hit by a bomb while he was in an ambulance; taking 6 weeks to recover; going in early spring 1945 with five doctors and 15 medical personnel to Prachitice, a women's concentration camp in Czechoslovakia near Pilsen; treating about 100 Jewish women survivors, who were in their early teens or older and sleeping on three tiered bunks; how the women helped and fed each other though they were suffering from frostbite, pneumonia, and other communicable diseases and had been marched from a camp in Poland; staying two weeks and feeling very connected to them; seeing the tattooed numbers on their arms, and how this was turning point for him, where he went from being a boy to a man; being replaced by another medical unit and going to Vienna, Austria as a medical technician until April 1946; meeting many Austrians who claimed they never heard or saw what was happening to Jews , going back to Brooklyn, N.Y. then to the University of Chicago for a master's degree in industrial psychology; getting married; having two children; working for a toy company; and racially integrating the work force.

Philip Pines (né Philip Pinkofsky), born in Brooklyn, New York on February 22, 1920, discusses his childhood with his parents, who were from Minsk, Belarus; experiencing verbal antisemitism at age 11; finishing high school and going to City College of New York; being active in a movement against Hitler; picketing the German Consulate while studying history at Columbia University; getting called up for the military on February 13, 1942 and sent for infantry training at Camp Croft in North Carolina; being sent to Camp Pendleton in Virginia to be part of a Coastal Defense Team; being part of a heavy machine gun platoon for three months; going to radio mechanics school in Washington, DC and then to Fort Monroe on the Chesapeake Bay; going to Camp Ashby for three months and receiving orders for Camp Ritchie in Maryland to be on the 2nd Mobile Radio Team; feeling that the German refugees in the propaganda section looked down on the technical people who were printing material and operating from broadcasting trucks; being sent to Camp Sharp in Gaithersburg, MD; sailing on the Queen Elizabeth with 20,000 men to Glasgow, Scotland; being moved to Clevedon, Wotton-on-Edge, and Pittsfield near Bristol, England; preparing for D-Day by training on every type of weapon; landing with his radio group on D-Day on Omaha Beach in Normandy, France; operating a radio transmitter trailer in Colombières, France; going to Brittany, France and enabling Charles de Gaulle to broadcast from Rennes by hooking up a transmitter to Toury on Radio Bretagne; going on to Bastogne, Belgium and Maastricht, Netherlands; seeing V-1 bombs; operating a radio transmitter for reporters; seeing refugees in Germany and stopping police who were beating up displaced persons in shops; his broadcasting unit being in Bremen, Germany when he turned down an opportunity to go to Bergen-Belsen after May 8; not talking to any refugees; leaving for the United States in 1945; receiving a master's degree; and feeling that his religious outlook was not affected by his wartime experience.

Ida Wulc, born in 1925 in Vilnius, Lithuania, discusses her childhood; going to a Jewish school; her father’s bakery; living in the ghetto in 1941; getting arrested and being jailed for six weeks; the round up of her family; jumping off a truck, being helped by a woman, and going back to the ghetto; working on the railroad; going by train in 1943 to Estonia; building bunkers for one year in Klooga; conditions in the camp; going to Danzig (Gdańsk, Poland) and Stutthof; working in a munitions factory in Hamburg; being in Bergen-Belsen at end of the war; going to Landsberg and meeting her husband; having a daughter; immigrating to the United States to Chicago in 1950; and continuing to dream of her war-time experiences.

Joseph Sucher, born September 10, 1930 in Vienna, Austria, discusses his childhood with his twin sister, Erika, and his older twin siblings, Lily and Harry; his mother Taube, who ran a textile store, and his father Max, who had a Ph.D. in Semitic languages; living in a Jewish neighborhood and attending a Jewish school; how in March 1938 Hitler spoke at a nearby railroad station; experiencing antisemitism by an SS officer; going to the synagogue with his father and seeing the SS taking people away but letting him and his father go; his father’s store being taken over; his father going to Luxembourg in August 1938; his mother and the four children getting transit visas to visit Max in Luxembourg; their journey through Germany to Luxembourg; staying in a hotel room with 10 people; living in Luxembourg for two years with Joint support but having no schooling; going in October 1940 to occupied France, where his father led Yom Kippur services; getting transit visas to unoccupied France and Spain; going to Portugal and staying in Vila Formosa; his older brother and sister going to Palestine; living in Oporto; getting an affidavit from a Milwaukee, WI relative and sailing on the Serpa Pinto with the Chassidic Rabbi Schneerson; living in Milwaukee for three years; moving to New York in 1945 and going to high school and Brooklyn College; earning a Ph.D. in physics in 1957; teaching at the University of Maryland for 41 years; getting married in 1951 and having four children; feeling American especially when he is in Europe; and his feelings on how the Holocaust influenced his personality.

Wolfgang Samuel Price, born August 16, 1930 in Berlin, Germany, discusses his father Simon Prejs, who fought in the German Army in WW I and was awarded the Iron Cross; his father’s haberdashery store; his mother Margaret (née Loser); his observant family; being expelled from public school and then going to a Jewish school; wearing a star on his coat; his father financing Wolfgang's two uncles, Willy and Herbert, to go to the United States in 1936; going to his father's haberdashery store after it was destroyed on Kristallnacht and picking up the few remaining clothes and feeling confused about what was happening; leaving in April 1939 with parents and younger brother John and boarding a freighter "The Ulm" in Hamburg, Germany; living in the hold with bananas and docking in Balboa, Panama; his father getting a job in the Canal Zone; living in one room of a private house; going to a Panamanian Catholic school; learning Spanish; adjusting to the floods; going to Ellis Island in the fall of 1941; being met by his uncle Willy and his aunt Ruth and staying with them for 6 weeks; moving to his family's own apartment in Queens, NY; going to public school with other German Jewish refugee children; his father’s employment in a parts factory; graduating from high school in 1945; working as a waiter; living on a dairy farm in Vermont; hearing that his grandparents did not survive; his father dying in 1949; joining the Air National Guard; going on active duty in March 1951, being a medical corpsman on B-29s; working as a salesman for industrial chemicals in Milwaukee; getting married; studying labor economics at Cornell University; working for the Atomic Energy Commission in Albuquerque, NM; doing strategic planning for nuclear weapons production from 1962 to 1968; doing public sector consulting for community mental health centers; opening his own firm advising on urban renewal; going to Vienna, Austria in 1998 for the International Atomic Energy Agency to negotiate the extension of the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty; settling in Vienna and is writing a book about employment in Europe; and his feelings that the Germans have come to terms more than the Austrians with their history.

Eizic Ingber, born in December 22, 1923, discusses his childhood and family in Sighet, Romania; living on the same street and attending the same schools as Elie Wiesel; his brothers being drafted into the Hungarian Army; his deportation to Auschwitz II-Birkenau with his mother, father, and sister; his experience working as a machinist at Birkenau alongside American prisoners of war; his transfer to Bergen-Belsen and working as a machinist at the camp; the liberation of Bergen-Belsen by British forces; his attempts to find his family members after the war; meeting his wife, who is also a survivor from Romania; moving to Israel and volunteering for the army; immigrating to the United States and living in Brooklyn, NY while working as a mechanic; moving to Maryland in the 1980s; having a stroke in 2011; and thinking a lot about his wartime experiences now.

Esfir Brodskaya, born in September 30, 1928, discusses her family and part of her childhood in Ukraine; the many moves her family made when she was young and ending up in Russia; living in a home for sick children for two years; her father volunteering for the Russian Army; celebrating the end of World War II with her mother and her father’s return; starting Russian public and music schools at the age of eight; learning English; visiting Ukraine and experiencing antisemitism; attending university and working in Uzbekistan for a year; the difficulties and isolation she faced while working for an institute of organic chemistry; her marriage and two sons; moving to Israel and the United States; her feelings about Germany, Israel, and talking to her children and grandchildren about her experiences; living in the US and her religious practices; and her current activities at the Jewish Community Center.

Marc Samuels (né Marek Lokiec), born in Poland in February 1922, discusses his childhood with two brothers and four sisters; his religious Zionist father Shmuel who owned a hardware store; attending Jewish schools; seeing German soldiers on September 1, 1939; being forbidden to walk on the sidewalk, wearing a yellow star, and substituting himself in place of his father’s work assignment; being taken with his family in November 1942 to a castle; seeing people getting beaten and a young man being hung for trying to save a Torah; being transported to Auschwitz and getting tattooed with number 75157; being sent to Golleschau and working in a stone quarry for two and a half years; walking day and night on a death march; being liberated near Munich, Germany; living there until going to the United States in the late 1940s; living in the Jewish Theological Seminary dormitory in New York City; attending high school, then Columbia University, and getting a master’s degree in teaching; getting married in 1957; tutoring children in synagogues in Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut; and his thoughts on the Holocaust.

Ava Schonberg (née Eva Schonberg), born January 18th, 1937 in Antwerp, Belgium, discusses her extremely Orthodox upbringing in a home that spoke French, Yiddish, and Flemish; her mother having fake papers saying she and her two sisters were ill and could not travel to avoid deportation; her father being taken by the Gestapo in 1942 and being killed in a concentration camp; being hidden separately from her sisters in Brussels; staying in a convent; being smuggled into Switzerland in April 1944, staying in a refugee camp and then with a family in Zurich until the end of the war; being placed in an orphanage until her mother remarried an extremely Orthodox Rabbi; moving to the United States in 1953; helping to organize the International Conference of Child Survivors in 1991; working in a science lab at Columbia University for 36 years; feeling the absence of her extended family; blocking out bad memories of the war; and reflecting upon the way her restrictive, Orthodox upbringing affected her later in life.

Adi Eisenberg (né Abraham Freiburger), born on February 18, 1935 in Breslau, Germany (Wroclaw, Poland), discusses being an only child to father, Eliezer Freiburger, an accountant, and mother Helene Kolatacz; having religious Zionist grandparents; moving to Skala near Cracow at age three; speaking Polish, German, and Yiddish; being frightened in September 1939 when the Germans invaded; moving to his grandparents’ house; his grandparents’ businesses being taken away in 1940; experiencing antisemitism; going back to the countryside with his mother while his father stayed; his father being taken and shot on September 23, 1942; taking a new name, Adam Mokra, going with his mother to Zakopane by train in November 1942; crossing the border into Czechoslovakia then to the Hungarian border; walking with a group of eight people; being taken to a civilian jail for crossing the border illegally and receiving 20 pots of cholent (stew) from the Jewish community; being transported to Budapest, Hungary by train to another jail where he stayed for a month; being released as a political refugee; living near Kolorcha for six months as a Christian; going back to Budapest, where the Joint helped them rent an apartment; going into shelters during bombings until January 1945; returning to Skala for a short time; going to Munich, Germany and then to the displaced persons camp Bad Reichenhall until 1951; his mother getting married to Oscar Eisenberg, who adopted Adi; having a Bar Mitzvah in the DP camp and going to school; sailing on the General Blatchford ship with other refugees to New York, NY; being met by the Jewish Agency; living in Worcester, MA near his aunt; going to high school and working as a pants presser; graduating from Worcester Polytechnic Institute; getting a Ph. D from Princeton in chemistry; being a professor at UCLA and McGill University; his feelings about the Holocaust; and his bond with other survivors.

Joseph Fenster (né Fensterheim), born in Paris, France June 18, 1932, describes his parents, Charles Fensterheim and Sophie Bachner, both of whom immigrated from Krakow, Poland; his one sister, Charlotte, born April 27, 1940, who now lives in Atlanta, GA; how his family was not at all religious or political; how his mother and father spoke Polish and Yiddish, and his primary language was French; not being aware of antisemitism; the arrest of his father and mother in June 1940, at which point his father was sent to Auschwitz and then to a series of camps under German occupation forces run by the French and eventually died in July 1942; how his mother was rounded up in the Vél d'Hiver and sent to Drancy in July 1942 and was then deported to Auschwitz; being sent to orphanages in Paris; being sent to an abbey in Belleville in Normandy where the Abbot, who was with the French Resistance, baptized him and gave him a predated certificate of baptism; hiding paratroopers in the abbey’s cider vats; hiding in the woods to avoid the bombing; how after the invasion of June 6, 1944 he was sent to an orphanage in Carteret; eventually going to the United States; experiencing many displacements in his life; attending Brown University; spending 20 years in the Air Force; his three children and four grandchildren; having married his wife in 1955 in a church; and feels that his experiences have affected the way he’s raised his kids, making him overprotective and determined to keep them out of harm’s way.

Felix Transport, born in Paris, France on July 20, 1930, describes living with his mother until he was put in a children’s home at age four because his father had moved to the United States; having difficulties as a child and being moved to several orphanages and children’s homes; seeing throngs of Parisians trying to escape Paris when he was being put on a train to go to Mercues in SW France; living in a home run by a Rabbi with a staff of four people; living in a series of homes from 1939 to 1942 all part of the OSE network (Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants); being taken to another village to a college at the end of 1942 when the Rabbi died; the OSE hiding the fact that they were Jews; first learning about concentration camps in 1945; spending 1945 to 1947 in Champigny, where his mother lived nearby; moving at age 17 back to Paris with his mother; his mother trying to find ways to move to the US and finally finding sponsorship by the man who was his uncle’s boss; arriving in New York, NY, first in Manhattan and finally in the Bronx; his mother dying five years later; joining the US Army after working as a successful graphic designer for five years; being in the Army for two years and working as a translator in France; and returning to New York, where he owned a graphic design company for 24 years until his retirement.

Frank Salz (né Josef Franz Salz), born on February 11, 1936 in Loket, Czechoslovakia, discusses his childhood in Marienbad (Mariánské Lázne, Czech Republic); his parents' haberdashery store; how in September 1938 he was ordered to Prague on 24 hour notice by the Germans; Jewish children not being permitted to go to school; being scheduled to go to England on September 8, 1939 on a children’s transport but not going because the war started; his family receiving a letter on November 17, 1942 giving them two days to report to the railroad station, where they stayed for two nights; being transported in cattle car number CC 111 with his parents and grandmother to Terezin (Theresienstadt); living in Hanover Barracks with 50 other people; his maternal grandmother, Emilie Schenk Steiner, being sent to Auschwitz; his mother, Hedwig, working in a mica factory and his father, Otto, being a police officer; going to a sub rosa school; receiving a package of food from US relatives in June 1944; his father saying “Take care of your mother” when Otto was transported to Auschwitz in September 1944; carrying boxes of grey ashes from the crematorium so he could receive a can of sardines; contracting measles and having to sleep on the barracks floor; seeing Russian soldiers on May 9, 1945; being quarantined for three weeks and then returning to Prague; his neighbors returning everything they had kept safely to his mother; being the only Jewish child in class and getting stones thrown at him; going to the railroad station every day for six weeks looking for his father; going to Sweden in 1946 and arriving in New York on July 22, 1946, having been sponsored by his uncle Carl Schenk; going to school for Jewish orphans in Pleasantville, NY; attending high school in New York; receiving two scholarships to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); going to graduate school, serving in the Army Corps of Engineering, getting married, and moving to Hartford, CT; selling his engineering firm and going to law school; moving to California; how until 10 years ago he had never spoken about his experience to his children or fellow workers; and returning in 1984 to Terezin, where he learned that he was one of only 94 children there who survived out of 15,000.

Arlette Grossfeld (née Zarnowski), born on February 7, 1930 in suburban Paris, France, discusses her childhood; her father Wolf, a furrier, and her mother Caroline Gold; her younger brother and her large, observant extended family; speaking French at home; having Jewish and non-Jewish friends; enjoying reading, swimming, and tennis; first hearing adults speaking about Hitler and Kristallnacht in 1938; not experiencing any antisemitism; going south in 1941 with her extended family by train to Nice, France; being sent with her brother to a farm owned by the Marchais family and taking the name Arlette Romanier; attending church with the family but not going to school; writing to her parents but not having a newspaper or a radio; helping with planting; her brother having a close relationship to the farmer who got paid for keeping the children; celebrating D Day; her parents coming in 1945 at war’s end and going back to Paris to their empty apartment; her father working in his old business; going back to school; finding out that all of her father’s family in Poland and her mother’s brother and sister did not survive; immigrating to the United States in 1949 sponsored by her maternal uncle Leo Gold who was a doctor; working in her uncle’s office; marrying Phillip Grossfeld, a survivor of Auschwitz from Radom, Poland; having six children; and feeling very lucky.

Marianne Selinger (née Winter), born on September 24, 1921 in Vienna, Austria, discusses her childhood with her father Max, a wounded WW I soldier, and her mother Anna; her education at a public school for gifted children; living in a mixed neighborhood with her younger brother Steven; speaking German at home and learning English at school; being a Junior Champion swimmer; having Jewish and non-Jewish friends and Czech cousins on her mother’s side; being upset at seeing German soldiers marching at the time of the Anschluss; being stopped on the street with her mother and ordered to clean a villa and released soon after; not listening to Hitler’s speeches on the radio; talking to friends about leaving Vienna; corresponding with a pen pal Campfire Girl, Jane Bamberger, who lived in Reading, Pennsylvania and whose parents sent affidavits for Marianne and her family; being sent to Prague, Czech Republic with Steven to stay with relatives; her parents coming two months later; flying to Zurich, Switzerland and then to Genoa, Italy in January 1939; sailing to New York on the SS Conte de Savoia of the Italian Line in February 1939; being met by the Bomberger family (who were not Jewish), who took them to Reading, PA; working as a dressmaker then having her own store; getting married in 1946 and moving to New York; having two children; inheriting real estate in Vienna and living there and in Florida; becoming a widow; remarrying and losing her second husband; and feeling totally American but also feeling that the world has not learned the lessons of the Holocaust.

Hugo Langshur (born Hugo Langschur in Jagerndorf (Krnov), Czechoslovakia on December 15, 1921) discusses his childhood with his father, a high school teacher, and his mother, who went to secretarial college; having a large extended family; speaking German at home though his father also spoke English, French, and ancient Greek; living in a mixed neighborhood of Jews and non-Jews; being mocked by other children at ages 10 and 11; having to sing German nationalist songs, living in a culture of growing danger, listening to Hitler’s speech, and feeling threatened; having to share a school desk with a classmate whose father wore a Czech Nazi uniform; his parents being urged by his mother’s sister in Britain to emigrate but his father did not want to lose his pension and his mother did not want to leave her hometown; his aunt insisting that his parents let Hugo go to England at the end of May 1938; going to Prague, Czech Republic by himself which was traumatic as he had never been so far away on his own; traveling through Germany and Belgium; docking at Dover, England and being met by his relatives at Victoria Station; living with Elsie and James Layton (Loebenstein) in Hampstead; corresponding with his parents in shorthand through Budapest until 1942 when they were deported to Theresienstadt and then shot in a forest in Baranovice (Baranavichy, Belarus); graduating from the military academy as a 2nd lieutenant in the British Army in 1943; transferring to northern Scotland; being posted to Ghana in 1944, then Burma, Nigeria, Naples (Itlay), and Graz (Austria); working as a mechanical engineer in a workshop; being transferred to northern Germany and being demobilized in 1948; working in London and then settling in Montreal, Canada in May 1951 as an aeronautical engineer with Pratt and Whitney; playing down his Jewishness because of much antisemitism in Canada; returning to Prague with a French Canadian group and seeing his parents name on the Pinkas synagogue wall.

Adolf Grünbaum (born on May 15, 1923 in Cologne on Rhine, Germany) discusses his childhood; his parents Benjamin and Anna; his younger siblings Susanne and Norbert; living in a moderately religious household; being in a Zionist youth group HaShomer HaTzair; having a large extended family many of whom went to Belgium and then did not survive; being excluded from swimming pools and other restrictions in physical instruction by the Nazis; feeling intimidated and fearful seeing SS and SA troops yet nonetheless feeling defiant; being a non-believer interested in philosophy but having a Bar Mitzvah to show he was part of a community; attending Kulturbund concerts; his family immigrating to the United States in February 1938; traveling via train to Belgium and then sailing on the Milshtein boat of the Cunard Line to New York; his diaries; attending high school; graduating in the fall of 1943 from Wesleyan College; becoming a US citizen; entering the US Army and being sent to Camp Ritchie in Maryland along with Sigmund Freud’s nephew Harry Freud to be trained in military intelligence to interrogate highly placed German SS and civilians as a member of Mobile Field Intelligence Unit (MFIU) number 2; being stationed in Berlin, Germany in Himmler’s headquarters on Lake Wannsee; questioning highly placed Germans, such as Dr. Ernst Sauerbruch; returning to the US in 1946; receiving a master’s degree in physics from Yale and a Ph. D. in the philosophy of science at Columbia University; becoming an academic at the University of Pittsburgh since 1960; having honorary doctorates from universities in Cologne and Constanze, which gives him a sense of historical vindication; and how he only feels at home in the United States.

Ina Zigelman (née Sagenkahn), born on June 4, 1925 in Memel (Klaipeda), Lithuania, discusses her childhood with her father, a shopkeeper, and her sister Hannah, who was three years older than her; her very large extended family; speaking German at home and learning modern Hebrew after school; enjoying swimming, skating, and ice skating; attending a German public school for four years then to a private high school; having no restrictions between 1933-1938; her father selling his business and leaving after Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia and going to Kovno, Poland (Kaunas, Lithuania); getting affidavits from her mother’s relatives in the United States; going to Kovno and renting two rooms from Jacob Gens (later head of the Vilna Ghetto); attending the Sholom Aleichem Yiddish school; hoping to get visas to go to San Francisco, but the American consulate being closed; the German invasion; her uncle and cousins getting killed; her father hiding in the apartment while she hid in the basement after putting sandbags against the windows during bombings; refusing to wear the yellow star; being ordered into the ghetto August 15, 1941; dismantling radios and other appliances so the Germans would only get damaged goods; her mother being in a bad emotional state; her family of four living in one room with no plumbing; getting a certificate showing she was only 13 so she could stay home, which allowed her to work in her mother’s place; shoveling dirt and loading bricks 14 hours daily at an airport; being involved in the underground teaching young children at night; repairing German soldiers’ uniforms and stealing the insignias to give to the resistance; not going to the partisans as she was afraid her mother would tell someone; losing many friends and relatives at the Ninth Fort; her father losing his eye after being beaten trying to protect some children and then being sent to Dachau; being deported to Stutthof in the summer of 1944; living with nuns and Romanies; sewing numbers on clothing; going by boat from Danzig to Elbing and walking through forests to a village named Truntz; sleeping in tents and digging anti-aircraft trenches; getting strafed by Russian planes in January 1945; being liberated in Torun, Poland by a Russian Jew from Kiev, Ukraine on a white horse on January 23, 1945; sleeping in a railroad station in Alexandrov; being ordered by the Russians to guard cattle, oxen, and horses in a village; getting to the Red Cross Headquarters in Munich, Germany and learning that her father was in Feldafing; she, her sister, and her mother joining her father in September 1945; getting married and celebrating with a can of pineapple juice; working for the UNWRA as an interpreter beginning in December 1945; meeting General Eisenhower when he visited her office; arriving in New York, NY on May 24, 1946 on the S.S. Marine Perch; settling in California; feeling that she lost her teenage childhood; and going back to Kovno, Ninth Fort, Ponary Forest, and Stutthof and finding it painful.

Madeleine Bartfeld Sigel (born February 16, 1924 in Vienna, Austria) discusses her childhood; her father’s delicatessen and his management of a theater and a cabaret; attending a public elementary school then a private girls’ school; taking a religion class with the other Jewish students; her parents not being religious or Zionists, though they celebrated holidays; having a second home in Baden, Austria; feeling independent and not experiencing antisemitism initially; not going to see Hitler in March 1938; Nazis taking over her father’s business; furniture being taken away from their apartment; Jewish teachers leaving her school and the school permanently being closed to Jews; her father hiding to avoid being arrested and her mother having to scrub sidewalks, which affected her emotionally; going to the United States embassy to get forms and forging her father’s signature; getting a quota number and leaving in December 1938 for Venice, Italy; going to Zurich, Switzerland, where her father had moved; getting three visas for Cuba; traveling through France and in May 1939 boarding an English cargo ship with tickets paid for by a Jewish organization; being among 70 Jewish passengers and Cubans, who had fought in the Spanish civil war; getting near Cuba and seeing the St. Louis; being told they could not land and continuing on through the Panama Canal to the west coast of South America, passing Colombia, Peru, and northern Chile; transferring to another ship (the Orduna Orbita); going to Panama and being quarantined for two months; living in the Fort Amador station in the American Zone from May 1939 to September 1940, where the Jewish community came to visit the refugees; gathering around one radio when the war started; her uncle sending affidavits and getting visas to US; sailing to Ellis Island and settling in New York, NY; attending business school and learning cost accounting; getting a secretarial job; getting married in 1947 to Stanley Sigal, a Navy lieutenant and Harvard graduate; moving to Washington, D.C.; still feeling connected to Vienna but not feeling Austrian; and her feelings about Germans.

Jack Ophir (Jurek/Jacob Feingold), born on April 6, 1938 in Lodz, Poland, discusses his father, Jehuda Leib Feingold, a housewares merchant from an Orthodox family who left the tradition when he married; moving to Warsaw, Poland in late 1942 by train, bus, and through tunnels with his parents and nanny; living in a small apartment in the ghetto from December 1942 to April 1943; his father’s desire to go to Palestine where his family lived; trying to get out to the Aryan side when the ghetto was up in flames during the uprising and sitting on his father’s shoulders and smelling the burning buildings while going through tunnels in the sewers; exiting the ghetto and his family being given Polish papers; going by train for six hours to Bergen-Belsen, living in Block 10 along with nine other children; crying from hunger; seeing prisoners burying knives, combs, and glasses which the children would dig up to play with; how his mother got soup made of water, salt, potato peelings, and beets to serve a few people; his memory of seeing hundreds of people rush to the soup cans and how many died from overeating; seeing yellow stars but how they had no meaning for him; sleeping on the floor; clinging to his mother and then getting separated from her and placed in a camp for abandoned children; reuniting with his mother in Paris, France in June 1945; going to Marseille, France in the fall of 1945; sailing and playing games on the boat with other children from Bergen-Belsen; arriving in Palestine as Jacob Lazar Feingold; being taken to Atlit and then to Tel Aviv to his father’s sister, Leah Blumberg; attending a religious school and learning Hebrew; his father selling piece goods and his mother working as a seamstress; being a physically aggressive and difficult child; feeling joyous at the establishment of the State of Israel; having a Bar Mitzvah in 1951; becoming a more friendly person; becoming a member of the Israeli army in 1956; changing his name to Ophir (a field of gold in the Bible); going to a military academy and becoming an officer in the paratroopers; going to the United States in 1960 and studying in CCNY and the Fashion Institute of Technology; having a women’s store and then going into the antique business; feeling he lost his childhood; and having no feelings towards Poland or Bergen-Belsen since he does not respond emotionally.

David Baruch (born in Patras, Greece on April 27, 1932) discusses his childhood; his older brother Isaac and younger sister Ostrula; his parents Rochelle, who died young, and Sabatai, who was friendly with their Greek Orthodox neighbors; how he and Isaac were the only two Jewish students in school; experiencing antisemitism on holidays when Jewish stores were closed; leading a comfortable, secure life; first hearing about Hitler when Germany invaded Greece in 1941 and seeing a parade of heavy artillery in the main square of Patras with tanks directed towards pedestrians; attending a synagogue meeting at age nine and hearing that Germans wanted to transport Jews to camps to be killed; his father getting fake IDs (David’s new name was George Varuchos); keeping up close relations with Christian neighbors; curtailing their outside activities since the Germans would stop people on streets and would leave their bodies hanging on a tree in the public square; the politeness of the Italian soldiers; hearing that Jews were being taken from Salonica to Auschwitz; being warned to leave two days before Rosh Hashanah in the summer of 1943; spending one night in the basement of a friend’s house; walking 50 kilometers to Vrachni; living in a hut and his grandmother cooking on bricks; German soldiers passing by their hut, which was concealed by branches and trees; how the president and priest of the village brought them food and they stayed in the hut for 13 months; his father forbidding David and Isaac to join the partisans; hearing that Greece was liberated in the fall of 1944 but staying one more week in the hut to make sure; returning to Patras and finding their house terribly damaged; attending synagogue services; seeing Isaac Matzas, the head of the Jewish community; his father and uncle opening a textile business; being welcomed back by teachers and students at school, except for one teacher who yelled antisemitic remarks and was dismissed along with the principal; attending high school and being in the Greek Army for 19 months; going to the United States on June 11, 1956; working 18 hour days as a shipping clerk; becoming a buyer, getting an accounting job, and retiring in 2008; losing his childhood but gaining strength and courage; and refusing to go to Germany because of what Hitler did, which is engraved in his heart forever.

Alexander Konstantyn (born September 1, 1937 in Northeastern Poland near Bialystok) discusses his childhood in the only Jewish family in the town; his father Baruch, who was a wheat merchant; not having any problems between 1939-1941, though they saw Polish women and children refugees in the summer of 1941 and heard that Jews were being sent to labor camps; his mother’s suggestion that they leave; joining a Polish group who was heading south in the summer of 1942; sleeping outside or in barns; staying for 10 days with a farmer who brought them a poisoned pie that killed Alex’s father; leaving immediately; begging for food and being taken to a police station and put in a cell with other Jews; his mother facilitating their escape from the camp; his mother dressing Alex like a girl; returning to their village in the beginning of 1943 to Mr. Burka, who did business with Alex’s father; giving Mr. Burka their gold and asking for shelter; living in a hole in the ground in a woodshed in the dark for almost two years; his mother rubbing his muscles to help him grow; the inventive stories his mother told him and made him repeat back to her; hearing Russian and German voices in the end of 1944; being liberated by Russian soldiers; coming out of the hole and being frightened at first of the soldiers who then made him a mascot; his mother remarrying another survivor, Mr. Diament; going to Lodz, Poland and attending a Jewish school; getting beaten up by Polish children; having nightmares and bitter memories; taking a train to Italy in the summer of 1950 and then going by boat to Israel; living in Herzliya and learning Hebrew; still having nightmares in high school; going into the Israeli Army in 1958; seeing a large parade of tanks for Ben Gurion’s visit, which ended his nightmares; going to Newark, NJ, where his uncle lived; his work unloading merchandise; attending Jewish Theological Seminary and Pace University; getting married in 1969; being a school principal and retiring in 2009; speaking to school children but still getting emotional when talking about the death of his father; and not wanting to get reparations.

Charlotte Schiff (born Charlotte Minna Goldschmidt on July 1, 1937 in Fulda, Germany) discusses her childhood; her father Herman, who was a hides and skins importer, and her mother Irma; her father being taken away on Kristallnacht in November 1938 to Buchenwald for three months; how her father was beaten with iron bars; her father’s return and their move in 1939 to Frankfurt, Germany, where they stayed for three years with the help of non-Jews; her parents wearing a yellow star; being transported in a cattle car to Terezin (Theresienstadt); living first in an attic with 120 people and then being separated from her parents and grandmother and living in a children’s home; her father being placed in a military caserne and her mother living in another children’s home as a helper; not attending classes or knowing about the children’s operetta Brundibar; her father giving money as a bribe so Charlotte wouldn’t be sent to a camp to be gassed; her grandmother dying in Terezin; witnessing many people standing in an open field surrounded by Germans with machine guns; being malnourished; the playground being cleaned up for an inspection and the children not being allowed to play there; how every day was like the next; being liberated at age eight after 32 months; being greeted with tulips by the mayor of Frankfurt; staying in a hospital for 10 months; attending a Frankfurt school and being the only Jewish student in the class; wanting to become a nurse, but being rejected because of her religion; sailing on the SS United States at age 19 and arriving in the US on July 4, 1956; working and going to night school in New York, NY; getting married in 1958 and moving to Connecticut; losing her husband to Lou Gehrig’s disease; not liking to talk about her wartime experience as life presents hardships and she doesn't want to overdo the misery; and her feelings about Germans.

Paula Gutter (born Perla Schwartzberg on August 18, 1935 in Zamosc, Poland) discusses her childhood; her father Nathan, who drove people with his horse and carriage, and her mother Sara; her older brother Meir and sister Sara; seeing buildings burning in September 1939 and her family immediately going to Lublin, Poland for one month until the Germans arrived there; leaving by train in October 1939 and sitting on the floor of the train on a pile of clothes; arriving in Kazan (in Tatarstan), Russia; living with her family in one room with an outside bathroom; her mother working in a restaurant and taking Paula with her; her father being taken to Siberia in 1943 for two years to construct buildings; her mother writing a letter to Stalin to get her husband back; being the only Jewish student in the Russian school; learning Russian easily; eating potato peels her mother brought home from her restaurant job; how there was never bombing in Kazan; her father returning in 1945; returning to Poland and not finding any relatives in Lublin (all but one had perished); seeing bodies lying in the street; living in the Heidenheim, Germany displaced persons camp from 1946 to 1948; attending Hebrew school; sailing by boat to Israel in 1948 with her family; living in Jaffa; moving to a new home in Tel Aviv; getting married in 1957; going to the United States in 1959; refusing to go to Germany; and not wanting to look back as it is too depressing.

Susan Feingold (née Sosanna Frank), born December 17, 1924 in Krefeld, Germany, discusses having a serene childhood in a well-to-do, extended Jewish family; her quiet father (born in Wintrich); her “leftist” mother (born in Krefeld), who was a classical singer; her first sense of the rise of antisemitism in 1933; the expulsion of Jews from school; receiving both sympathy and harassment from non-Jewish classmates; her pride in being Jewish; the liquidation of her father’s store following Kristallnacht; prohibitions against Jews in public; being assaulted in her home by Nazis who demanded to know the location of the family’s “foreign money;” her parents’ decision to send her to England with the assistance of the Committee for Jewish Refugees; her difficult goodbye to her parents; conditions for the children on board the train; her placement with a kind Jewish couple in England; the letters she exchanged with her parents; how communications ceased when her parents were sent to Treblinka concentration camp; evacuations during high school; how the American Joint Distribution Committee assisted with her immigration to the United States in 1946; studying with exiled German director, Erwin Piscator (famed critic of Hitler’s tyranny), and appearing in numerous TV, Broadway, and off-Broadway productions; marrying actor Lester Feingold; her daughter who passed away at age 40; founding Bloomingdale Family Program; her belief that her experiences in the past made her a better person; and how her pain, guilt, and tremendous need to protect freedom shaped her commitment as director of the Head Start program.

Eliahu Eilam Kimel, born on July 30, 1934 in Galicia, Poland, discusses his childhood; his parents Avraham and Regina (Rivka), who were both in the photography business; their non-Jewish neighbors; his father being a Zionist while his mother did not want to go to Palestine; having a large extended family of 100 members, of whom six survived; the Germans occupying his town; his father being beaten by a German, after which his family fled east to Lvov (L’viv, Ukraine) to relatives; his father making money by taking photographs for IDs; traveling east by train for three weeks without getting off and arriving in Ozero, Siberia; living there from 1939 until June 1941; his father working in the forest; being liberated in June 1941 but ordered to stay in the Soviet Union; going to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, then to Seragana, where they stayed for one year; having little food since fields were used to grow cotton for uniforms; not attending school and being taught how to read by a cousin; his father joining General Anders’ Polish Army in 1941; moving with his mother and aunt to a town near the army base; his mother getting ill, being pronounced dead in a hospital, and then revived by a doctor; his father being sent with the army to the Battle of Monte Cassino in Italy, for which King George gave Avraham a medal; going with his mother and aunt to a port on the Caspian Sea; fainting on the pier as he tried to get on a boat after stepping on a dead child; sitting on wooden benches on the tanker without getting up for 36 hours; arriving on the shore of Pahlavi, Iran, and then going to Teheran; his mother being taken to a hospital while he stayed with his aunt in a barrack for Jews; not being a part of the “Teheran Children” who stayed in an orphanage but being saved by them when he was being pushed into a waste ditch; staying for 18 months; attending school; leaving with his mother by boat to Suez; crossing the desert by train and going to Atlit in Palestine then to Jerusalem; attending high school; being in the Israeli Army from 1954 to 1957; studying engineering in the Technion in Haifa; getting married and having three sons; and still suffering from the trauma of his childhood.

Blanche Porway (née Bluma Fajnbuch), born on May 3, 1925 in Lodz, Poland, discusses her childhood; living in an elegant apartment in the center of the city; her father Leib, who owned a textile factory, and her mother Gitla; her siblings Sonja, Shulem, and Israel; going to a mostly Jewish public school; being a member of Betar; seeing Menachem Begin and Vladimir Jabotinsky in 1938; enjoying sports and reading books; the establishment of the ghetto in 1940; school being closed; wearing a yellow star; her whole family living in one bedroom in the ghetto with no plumbing; standing in line for rations; her father and 19 year old brother Sholem dying of starvation after two years; working in a factory making German uniforms and in an office; seeing Rumkowski publicly in the ghetto; being deported by cattle car to Auschwitz at end of 1944; trying to stay with her mother upon arrival but being pushed back to her sister; seeing her school friend hanging from an electrified fence; being given soup once a day; going after four weeks to Freiberg with her sister to work in an airplane parts factory; being transported in a cattle car to Mauthausen in February 1945 and seeing other girls eating grass during the journey; being liberated by a Jewish American soldier after two months; Polish prisoners killing some SS officers; staying three more months after liberation; returning to Lodz to see her apartment; meeting her future husband Hiller Porway, who was from Berlin; going with Hiller to Munich, Germany; her sister finding their brother Israel in Lodz; getting married in 1946; having a daughter; going to the United States after five years; her husband working in New Jersey in a furniture factory; having a second daughter; feeling that she has more in common with other survivors and that she is speaking for the 6 million victims; and feeling guilty that she could not save her mother during the selection process at Auschwitz.

Claude Kacser (né Klaus Kacser), born on April 13, 1934 in Paris, France, discusses his childhood; his father Felix, who was an electrical engineer, and his mother Katie, who was born in Berlin; moving to Vienna, Austria in 1935 and then to London, England in 1936; speaking French as his primary language; his father’s internment on the Isle of Man as a friendly “enemy alien” in June 1940; the release of his father after three months to the countryside to help develop small motors for aircrafts; his mother writing her 51-year-old distant cousin, Martin, in New York to sponsor six year old Claude; how at the pier, before his journey to New York, he held his mother’s leg and she had to push him on the boat (Cunard “Samaria”) and they were both in tears; landing in New York on an immigrant’s visa and with stateless nationality on October 3, 1940; his uncle placing him in a small boarding school in Forest Hills, Long Island; being moved to the Crow Hill School in Rhinebeck, NY with 30 other student boarders; his mother working for the BBC and sending him letters and many books from London; returning to England in July 1945; reuniting with his mother and learning after four hours that she and Felix were divorced; being introduced to his new father; having a difficult transition at school knowing American history but not British history; changing his name to Claude as Klaus sounded German; attending college at Oxford and completing a post-doctoral degree at Princeton; immigrating in 1962 and working at Columbia University; teaching at the University of Maryland from 1964 to 1997; giving up his British citizenship when he was naturalized but still admiring the Queen and English virtues; seeing a letter in the Washington Post in 2000 asking if there was an American Kindertransport; contacting Iris Posner in Silver Spring, MD who researched 1200 names of children on ship manifests and HIAS and Joint Distribution Committee records of unaccompanied children who came to the United States (of whom 600 were still alive); Posner founding the organization “One Thousand Children”; attending an OTC conference in 2002 in Chicago, IL and his identity changing then as he began considering himself a child survivor of the Holocaust; regretting his anger at his mother when she sent him away though she said “I had to save you"; feeling his psyche was damaged by his childhood experience, making him cautious, shy, and introverted; and his commitment to the OTC organization and the "Never Again” movement to aid refugees.

Etta Waldman (née Bodian), born on May 12, 1932 in Tarnopol, Poland (Ternopil', Ukraine), discusses her childhood in her large extended family; living with her family in a mixed neighborhood in a large house her parents built in 1936; her father, who raised and exported cows; her younger sister Rebecca; being an independent and athletic child; not experiencing antisemitism until Russians came in 1939 and sent people to Siberia; sleeping in other people’s homes until her father became friendly with the Russians and the family returned home; her parents being very protective and her father being politically astute; the Germans coming in 1941; playing with her friend and running home to find her kitchen filled with blood and water and her mother covered with leaves after being beaten by the Germans; her father going into hiding; all the furniture being taken; going into the Tarnopol fenced-in ghetto; staying close to the apartment; her father cutting the wire fence of the ghetto and the family escaping to the village outside the ghetto during one of the Aktions; hiding under the bed with her family for a whole day; seeing Jews being shot in the ghetto; her father arranging for Etta to stay with an older Polish couple in the countryside; seeing Jewish men digging a mass grave under the supervision of the SS; how the SS shot 1300 Jews, including her grandparents and her two aunts, on April 3, 1943; the ghetto being designated as Judenfrei; her father finding a farmer who let them stay in a bunker in his basement for 13 months with a bucket for sanitation; not going outside the whole time; her sister forgetting how to walk; living in an open field for three months in the spring and summer of 1944 as the Russians were approaching and Poles were ordered to evacuate; getting food from German field kitchens; her family sleeping under one shawl; her father finding an abandoned farm house; a German Wehrmacht officer coming with food and shaving supplies for her father during the last 10 days so he wouldn’t look Jewish with a beard; Russian tanks coming in July 1944; returning to their house, which had been destroyed; moving to a small town called Nikilinz in Galicia; Israelis coming in 1945 with false papers for the family to get to the American Zone; staying for two years in another small town called Beton, where her father had a small food stand; attending school and being too afraid to go to graduation because of the antisemitism among the Poles and the Ukrainians; going to different DP camps, including Fohrenwald, where she stayed for a year; going to the United States; arriving in Boston, MA on an Army vessel; going to New York; getting married in 1952 to another survivor; not talking until recently about her traumatic experience when she watched for hours as the mass grave was being dug and the Jews were killed; wanting that tragedy to never be forgotten; and feeling that her greatest gift is that she survived.

Hugo Herzog, born June 17, 1923 in Illingen, Germany, discusses his father Albert who owned a wallpaper and paint store, his mother Rosa, and his siblings Julius and Ruth; speaking German at home; experiencing antisemitism at age 10 and fighting back; being expelled from school after eighth grade; going to a Jewish school in Saarbrucken, Germany, which was closed after eight months; getting a job 200 miles away then going to Mannheim, Germany, where his brother was; going back home; seeing his synagogue being destroyed on Kristallnacht; going to Jewish Agency in Berlin, Germany and being accepted for a hasbara program in Cologne, Germany, where he slept in haystacks and ate farm food; going home to say goodbye to his family for the last time; going to Vienna, Austria and seeing anti-Jewish signs; traveling with a group of 15 year old boys and girls on the freighter "Patria" to Romania and then to Haifa, Palestine (Israel); the British not letting them land; the Haganah getting them clothes and food; living in Atlit, Palestine (Israel) for six months while working in the kitchen; moving to Kibbutz Ashdod Yakov; volunteering for the British Army in 1940; being trained and going to El Alamein (Alamayn, Egypt), Bengazi (Libya), and Tripoli (Libya); going to Italy by landing craft; returning to Illingen after the war and finding his brother; being discharged from the British Army in 1946; learning that his parents were deported to Auschwitz; washing dishes in a Tel Aviv restaurant; getting married in 1947; fighting with the Haganah in the War of Independence; working later as a crane operator; immigrating to the United States in 1953; and feeling very American and becoming less religious.

Jack Bass (born Joachim Henri Bass on November 1, 1932 in Bern, Switzerland) discusses moving to Paris, France in 1934 with his parents and Orthodox grandmother because of father's practice as an accountant; relocating to Milan, Italy in 1937, where he saw antisemitic slogans and swastikas; moving to Genoa, Italy in 1938; speaking Italian and wearing a uniform as a member of the Italian Fascist Youth group, Balilla; attending public school in Genoa; being warned by his mother Eva to be careful about what he said to his Christian friends; being aware that families were disappearing; his father, Morris, being taken away; going to Potenza in 1941/1942; living in the Ferramonte internment camp; sleeping in barracks with 40 to 50 children; being confused with lack of food and seeing people being taken away; his mother being put in a women’s prison camp, where she was sexually abused and became pregnant; returning to Ferramonte with his baby sister, Yolanda; walking with his mother, grandmother, and sister for 100 kilometers north when the Allied bombing started; getting food from Italian farmers during their three day walk; his mother going by herself and returning with an American soldier who drove them in his jeep to Naples, where they stayed for five days; how the four of them were chosen to go to the United States in 1944 with Ruth Gruber, whom he got to know on the boat (the Henry Gibbins); his mother performing as a singer on the boat; the American staff being very respectful and compassionate; being elated and joyous though it was a dangerous 10 day voyage in the North Atlantic because of the U-boats; arriving in Hoboken, NJ and being disinfected with DDT powder; going by train to Oswego, NY; crossing the Rainbow Bridge to get to Fort Ontario (though Ruth Gruber in her book says they crossed the bridge later after they left Fort Ontario); living in barracks; townspeople bringing them food, blankets, and books; being transported to a school at a state teacher’s college; being sent after one year to a foster family in Philadelphia, PA, where he had his Bar Mitzvah; becoming Americanized; going back to Oswego after nine months; attending high school for six months; being given permanent US residency; living in a tenement on the lower East Side of Manhattan with support from HIAS; being a street vendor selling fruits and vegetables at age 16; becoming a limo driver, marrying, moving to Florida, divorcing, and remarrying; having two children; trying to get documents as proof he was in Ferramonte for restitution; and having mental scars from what he saw as a child.

Morris Richter (born Moishe Richter on September 7, 1940 in Siberia, Russia) discusses his Polish parents, Joseph and Esther; his younger brother Shmuel; his father getting sick; going to Bergen-Belsen after the war; his mother being weak and depressed and the four of them living in one room up three flights of stairs in a barrack; attending kindergarten with 30-40 other children; having his picture taken with his brother standing in front on a staircase along with other children (in the USHMM Photo Archives, courtesy of Sally Bendremer Wideroff and Jean Bloch Rosensaft); burying cigarettes in a wood pile; feeling safe seeing soldiers; having freedom of movement; sailing to Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the ship Scythia in October 1948, living in Montreal; his father dying from leukemia in May 1949; his mother working in a clothing factory and remarrying in 1956; starting first grade at age 8; not wanting to talk about his experiences; graduating from high school and working in a hardware store; building houses with his brother in Montreal; marrying Gertie Stawacki from Lodz, Poland in 1962; not feeling marked by the Holocaust because he was so young but having an aversion to skinny people because he saw so many in Bergen-Belsen; how he has not discussed much with his daughters; and his feelings about Holocaust memorials.

Julian Reuter (born on December 21, 1926 in Berlin, Germany) discusses his childhood in his religious family; his older brother Wolfgang and older sister Ursula; his father, who was a furrier and died young in a motorcycle accident; singing in his synagogue’s choir; attending public school until he was not permitted and then attending a Jewish school, where the teacher secretly taught him English; having a large extended family; seeing Hitler in his open car and holding his schoolbooks under his coat so as not to salute him; fighting off German boys in yellow shirts; his mother urging him to be careful, knowing he was a marked person when he had to wear a yellow star; walking alone or with one other person so as not to call attention to himself; seeing the destruction from Kristallnacht; trying with his brother to leave Germany in early 1939 with false papers but getting arrested at the Dutch border; being taken alone to the Gestapo Headquarters in Berlin and imprisoned for six months in the cellar in the dark; getting constantly questioned and having no visitors; being transferred to Buchenwald for 3-4 weeks; being given a striped uniform; sleeping on a straw sack on a bunk; thinking not about his family but only how to stay alive; being transferred by cattle car and spending a few weeks in both Dachau and Sachsenhausen; arriving at Auschwitz; being dipped in disinfectant to get rid of lice; being tattooed with the number 107279 on his arm; being a Sonderkommando and after the 5 am Appels (roll calls) carrying bodies from gas chambers to the crematorium and the impact this had on him; concentrating on staying alive; how he and other boys were propositioned by older Kapos for sex in exchange for food; not hearing any talk of resistance as people were too weak; seeing people hanging from the electric wire fences, which gave him more will to survive; having his appendix removed without anesthesia or medication and going back to work after three days; getting 25 lashes after writing his Berlin address down while working at I.G. Farben; carrying 25 feet long rods and getting wounds on his shoulders and on his feet; his work in Monowitz unloading bags filled with 200 pounds of cement; being sent on a death march in January 1945; stopping at different camps and digging mass graves for prisoners who died; being evacuated in cattle cars and getting to Buchenwald after a month; being recognized by an Auschwitz guard who gave him food; being liberated by Patton’s army and taken to an American Red Cross hospital in a coma and weighing 68 pounds; recovering and going to Frankfurt, Germany, and working in Eisenhower’s headquarters as a translator; getting his immigration papers and sailing with soldiers to the United States in June 1945; working for a catering business; getting drafted and being sent to Germany in 1946 as a translator; returning and getting married in 1950 and having three children; working hard for the same caterer so as not to think about his experience; getting reparations; not belonging to survivors' organizations as they only want to talk about atrocities; knowing what it is like to be a refugee; and finding out that his brother died in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

Grete Hirsch, born on December 24, 1921 in Stuttgart, Germany, discusses her childhood; her father Otto, who was a lawyer, and her mother Martha; her older brother Hans and younger sister Ursula; playing the violin; having Jewish and non-Jewish friends; the family being assimilated and secular; celebrating Christmas as a national holiday; being non-Zionist; speaking the Swabian German language at home; being very independent; her family moving to Berlin, Germany after Hitler came to power while she stayed in Stuttgart and later moved to Berlin; her father becoming assistant to Leo Baeck, who was head of German Jewry; being a member of the Jewish Kulturbund musical groups; the gradual increase of restrictions on Jewish musicians; her brother Hans going to the University of Minnesota; moving with her sister to England in 1939; going to boarding school in Worcestershire; having to learn English and crying frequently; her parents not surviving the war; being convinced that music saved her in her loneliness; playing the violin occasionally with groups; always feeling that she was a refugee; earning a master’s degree in music; sailing to America with sister Ursula on the Belgian ship “SS Uruguay” in 1946; living with relatives in New York; earning another graduate degree in violin at the Manhattan School of Music; becoming a citizen in 1952; teaching violin; considering herself an American; and how she was born as a German who happened to be Jewish and she could not possibly forget that she is Jewish today.

Stefan Fuma (né Sigurd Ilarius Fuhrman), born on September 5, 1941 in Czernowitz (Chernivtsi), Ukraine, discusses being an only child; his mother Esther Litvack and his father Isidore, who was a dental surgeon who had studied in Bologna and Vienna (Nazis attacked his father in Vienna and broke his teeth); having a large extended family; how half of the town was Jewish; Germany declaring war; Romanian troops entering Czernowitz and forming a ghetto in September 5, 1941; his mother taking off her yellow star to go outside of the ghetto; the deportation of his father in October 1941 to a camp in Golda and his return; the transport of his paternal relatives to Mogdilev in Transylvania on the Ukrainian side of the Nestor River and dying from typhoid fever in a ghetto; staying with his parents in a rental apartment all during the war until the Russians came; the divorce of his parents; his father’s move to Bucharest, Romania; his mother becoming ill from scarlet fever, during which time he was in an orphanage for seven months; going to Bucharest in May 1946; moving to Siret; living in Bucharest with his father for the eighth grade; living with his mother again and attending high school in Radowicz; studying power engineering in college in Bucharest, where he was the only Jew in his dormitory and was criticized so he changed his name to Fuma; working in a water plant and being a member of Young Workers Organization until he was 26; his father going to Philadelphia, PA and Stefan being told by government security to get his father back; getting married in 1968 to Simona Weinglass; immigrating with his wife and daughter in March 1973 to Philadelphia; becoming a US citizen in 1979; working as a draftsman in York, PA; living in Israel from 1986 to 1990; studying philosophy, then computers, artificial intelligence, and programming; moving to Virginia in 2006 and to Washington, DC in 2011; retiring at age 75; and identifying as Jewish and American.

Josephine Becker (née Josephine Velelli), born on May 5, 1936 in Patras, Greece, discusses her childhood; her father Emanuel, who owned a fabric business; her mother Emily Osmo; living in a neighborhood with no other Jews; going to the beach and theater; only speaking Greek; visiting cousins on the island of Corfu; celebrating Passover at her grandparents’ home; the dangerous during the occupation, especially in 1942; going to a house in village owned by Katherine and Elias Michaelis who was a friend of her uncle, walking for hours to get there; the brutal murder of her uncle Victor; the murder of her uncle Joseph, who was killed by Germans and Greek collaborators; her grandparents’ devastation over the loss of two of their sons; hiding with a priest, who let her family sleep on with the horses; the loss of the first house she hid in; going with the Michaelis’ daughters to study with the priest; staying in hiding in the village for one and a half years with no radio; returning to her grandfather’s house in Patras in the fall of 1943; attending an all-girls private school and being the only Jewish student; finishing high school; cleaning up the synagogue before the Sabbath every week; moving to Athens and working for her uncle; having little money; immigrating to the United States in October 1956; being helped in Baltimore, MD by Jewish Family Service and Greek friends; working in a slipcover factory; getting married in August 1957 and having three children; visiting Greece three times but not to the village where she was in hiding; receiving reparations; not belonging to any survivors’ groups; her lack of interest in visiting Germany; and how she still thinks about her time in hiding.

Gerald lsidore Averback (lsidor Averbuch), born on February 19, 1930 in Soroca, Bessarabia (now Moldova), discusses his childhood in Oradea Mare (Romania); his father Samuel, who had a men’s clothing store; going to school until 1943; living in a mixed neighborhood and having non-Jewish friends; speaking Yiddish to his parents and Hungarian to his friends; going to synagogue, observing holidays, and having a Bar Mitzvah; playing violin; moving into a barbwire fenced-in ghetto in 1944 for two and a half months; going by cattle car to Auschwitz around June 12,1944; being separated first from his mother, then from his father; marching with a group of boys aged 13-17 to Birkenau to a children's section; wearing a striped uniform; the roll calls twice a day; eating soup and bread once a day; watching a group of adult men carrying soup cans and on the seventh day the leader telling him to hold on to an empty can and walk with the men to the adult camp; being told to stay hidden and not to talk and after two days, running in a heavy rain with his jacket above his head alongside an adult prisoner and getting in a truck; being taken in July 1944 to a work camp near Breslau, Poland; watching a hanging; working for two months, carrying wood and stones up a hill to fortify a castle; being told to leave the camp and march towards Germany; seeing civilians going in the same direction; sleeping on the ground at night; getting to the Prague, Czechoslovakia train station and staying in a cattle car for two days; Czech people giving them food; going to Flossenburg camp in late fall of 1944; going after two days by cattle car to Freiberg camp; being sent towards the western front by train; the bombing of the train by the Allies and having a young man whose eyes were shot out fall on top of him; spending hours in a tunnel during the bombing; seeing no soldiers and walking to Tuttlingen, Germany; seeing German soldiers who ordered him into a church basement, then being ordered out as the church was on fire; the wound on his leg from the bombing; hiding in a bunker and being forced to leave; crawling down a hill and being found by French Foreign Legion soldiers; going by jeep the next day to a French base; being flown on a stretcher to Strasbourg, France; going by ambulance to a military hospital in Colmar, France and being taken care of by a Romanian doctor; returning to Strasbourg in August 1945 and then going by train to a Paris military hospital; having to leave because he had tuberculosis; being taken by the Red Cross to a sanitarium in Davos, Switzerland, where he stayed for eight months; the Red Cross taking him to the Œuvre de Secours aux Enfants (O.S.E.) in Versailles, France; living in a children's home with 70 other children; finishing high school near the Sorbonne; going in the fall of 1947 with a group of children to London and then by boat (the “Aquitania”) to Halifax, Canada; flying with the children's group to Montreal, then going to Edmonton, Canada, where his uncle met him; living with a foster family for four years; getting his university degree; receiving $6000 from Germany for reparations in compensation for his mother's and father's death which covered his law school tuition; his feelings that the world has not learned from the past; not sharing his thoughts as others would not understand; still not trusting people and not joining groups; completing school to show his non-existent parents he survived, but not attending his own graduation because he had no family; being a loner because of his past; how he does not want sympathy and does not feel proud of surviving the Holocaust; lighting seven candles for the child survivors who lived with him in the French orphanage and who were then killed in the War of Independence in Israel; having no nostalgia for Romania; having no desire to go to Europe; working privately for the Prime Minister; identifying only as a Canadian; and feeling at once lucky to have survived while also wondering why he survived.

Harriet Schulman (née Hinda Leikach), born in Lutsk, Ukraine on July 10, 1938, discusses having a large extended family; growing up speaking only Yiddish; her father Moishe, who transported wheat from a flour mill and was liked by non-Jews who later helped the family to hide; her mother Etta and her younger sister Shulamit (later Shirley); moving to nearby Perespa, Ukraine; the German invasion in 1941; being sent to a ghetto; men being taken to dig ditches; her father and other men killing the German guard; escaping the ghetto with her mother and sister and living in the attic of a farmhouse; being joined by her father’s sisters Etta and Rivka; no longer being allowed to hide in the farmhouse; Shulamit being sent to hide with a Polish Catholic family until 1945; hiding in various places; going without food numerous times; being frightened by soldiers in uniform who shoved her around; her grandmother, who was dragged outside by soldiers and shot when she fought back; being taken to a barn with her parents five months before the end of the war; being taken into the woods with her parents by a Hungarian soldier and two German guards and being released soon after; going with her parents to hide with another family; her father going to retrieve Shulamit, who did not want to leave the Polish family she was hiding with; her family’s return to Poland, where her father opened a bakery; meeting David Ben Gurion who came to arrange for Jewish children to go to Palestine; going to a displaced persons camp near Stuttgart, Germany; learning Hebrew and getting care packages from the United States; the hospitalization of her sister for three months; sailing to Boston, MA in March 1949 with her family; living in Baltimore, MD; graduating from a public high school; getting married in 1958; having two sons; attending college for one year and then working as a bookkeeper in her husband’s store; being robbed in the store at gunpoint which painfully brought back her wartime experiences; seeing a psychiatrist; not telling her children about her experiences; her feeling that she does not have much in common with non-survivors; receiving reparations; and details on the feelings she still grapples with regarding the Holocaust and her experiences.

Robert Blumenthal, born on July 28, 1938 in Batavia, Dutch East Indies (now Jakarta, Indonesia), discusses his maternal grandparents Max and Emmy Adler and paternal grandparents Albert and Emma Blumenthal, who were all born in Hanover, Germany; his father Paul, who fought in the German Army and was wounded by shrapnel in WWI; his father’s work in an export-import firm of pharmaceuticals and food (G. Hoppenstedt) in the Dutch East Indies and his return later to Hanover; his mother Hilde Adler, who came from a very assimilated, not religious German Jewish family; his parents moving to the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and becoming well established in the Dutch community; his mother’s return to Holland in order to give birth to her oldest son Peter in 1936; his grandparents in Hanover selling their property after Kristallnacht in 1938; the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the fall of Singapore and the Battle of the Java; escaping on the S.S. Pieter Both to Australia under dangerous conditions along with his mother, brother, and cousin Lucy, the internment of his father in a Japanese prison camp near Bandung; seeing plumes of smoke on the coast of Sumatra; arriving in Sydney, Australia in March 1942; reconnecting with friends in Adelaide, including the Collet family; his mother experiencing some antisemitism; speaking Dutch at home and English at school; having a normal childhood but having to move frequently and having no contact with his father for four years; hearing bells ringing in August 1945 on VP Day; his father being released and getting the Batavia house and the business in order and then joining the family in Adelaide at the end of 1945; attending different schools in Adelaide; returning to Batavia for a few months and then going to Amsterdam; his parents having a “code of silence” and never talking about what the family experienced during the Holocaust; having a normal life living on Botticelli street, Amsterdam South; attending high school where they taught classics; studying chemistry at Leiden University; joining a ”fraternity”, enduring hazing, and feeling different for the first time; becoming friendly with Herman Frank who had been hidden during the war and going to Israel with him in 1960; becoming more interested in religion and going to the Weitzman Institute in Israel for five years to get his Ph.D.; marrying his Israeli wife; traveling to Paris and the United States; being recruited by the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland; identifying as an American Jew but also having an affinity for Holland; feeling that his experiences made him a more interesting person; not talking much about his childhood to his children but giving them a Jewish education; thinking about his experiences more now that he is older; feeling comfortable and safe here and not having to hide; how taking care of his mother’s emotional state while his father was imprisoned and the loss of his grandparents who perished in the Holocaust made him more empathetic; using writing to open up about his experiences; becoming aware of his parents’ experiences; and his mother dying at age 51 of cancer and three of his grandparents dying in concentration camps (Emma Blumenthal in Auschwitz and Emmy and Max Adler in Sobibor).

Frank (Franticek) Engelsmann, born on March 1, 1922 in Nové Mesto nad Váhom, Czechoslovakia (now in Slovakia), discusses his childhood; being the youngest of three girls and four boys; his father Samuel, who owned a restaurant, and his mother Gerte, who worked in the kitchen; attending a Jewish elementary school and then a Gymnasium for eight years; interacting with non-Jewish students; enjoying reading and playing tennis; his close family observing Jewish holidays; having a bar mitzvah; not experiencing any antisemitism until his family was forced to close their restaurant; working along with his brothers on a farm to get food; moving in 1942 to Debrecen, Hungary to live with his sister and her husband; earning money by tutoring students; learning Hungarian in two months; pretending to be a university student; staying with the Biro family for several months and using a Hungarian name; being captured in 1944 and put in prison and then sent to Mauthausen, where he worked in the kitchen peeling potatoes; being considered a Hungarian Jew; giving food to other prisoners; his parents and two sisters being sent to a concentration camp; being liberated on May 5, 1945 by American soldiers in tanks; going to Prague, Czech Republic; studying history and philosophy at Charles University (Univerzita Karlova) and earning a doctorate in 1948; marrying Hannah, a Gymnasium teacher, who had survived Theresienstadt with her parents; being a clinical psychologist at the Institute of Bohnice using the Rorschach Test when seeing patients; publishing two books on using statistics in studying mental hygiene; moving in 1967 to Geneva, Switzerland to work for the World Health Organization studying schizophrenia; going to McGill University in Montreal, Canada in 1968 to see patients and to teach; becoming professor emeritus; visiting the US; trying to avoid thinking about the war; feeling that the Germans made a great mistake and suffered for it; and his feeling that mankind is not perfect and his hope that there will be peace in 1000 years.

Sophie Cook (née Zsofi Katherine Koch), born on November 10, 1937 in Budapest, Hungary, discusses her childhood; her father Emery Koch, who was in the heating equipment business selling tiled stoves with iron doors; her mother Maria, who was a secretary for a trading company; their household, in which her grandmother and aunt lived as well as a nanny and a maid; growing up more secular than religious; her younger brother Michael; gentiles taking over her mother’s job in late 1943; learning as a child that it is permissible to lie in order to save your own life; learning the Lord’s Prayer and how to cross herself; being given the false name Sofika Mueller; her parents’ friends taking her and her brother to the villa of the Secretary of the Swedish Embassy; going into hiding with another Jewish family; being unhappy as the maid and the cook were very unpleasant; going to the Convent of the Sacred Heart where there were eight Jewish children; having no connection to her parents; not believing in the Virgin Mary but liking the smell of incense; not being urged to convert; the convent being raided in November 1944 by the Arrow Cross, who warned the nuns not to shelter Jews; pretending to be sick while the Arrow Cross was there; leaving the convent with the other Jewish children and walking during the night to the ghetto while being led by a nine year old boy; her brother staying behind and living in the convent kitchen; knowing about death even at the age of seven because she had read about a child being shot; identifying with a girl with a bleeding arm holding a doll in a Nazi propaganda poster; the numerous adults in the ghetto; the apartment building having a yellow star on the roof to warn the Allies not to bomb it; her mother having false papers and her father being in a slave labor camp (he and two friends escaped to Budapest); her mother finding a family willing to shelter Sophie and her brother; the bombing getting heavier and going into the shelter; the Russians coming in 1945; finding out that her grandmother, great-aunt, and grandfather had been murdered; moving into an apartment in the spring of 1945; going to a Jewish girls’ school; moving into Pest in the center of the city when the communists took over; her mother not talking about her aunt and grandmother and not going down to the Danube; going to a boarding school in the Swiss Alps with her brother; the school closing in January 1946; moving with her family to Paris, France in 1949; getting visas after waiting six years and arriving in the United States in May 1951; attending high school and studying the violin; living in Manhattan and not talking about her background; her father setting up a welding company with a man from Budapest who had been in Auschwitz; her mother and aunt working for the Justice Department; going to Radcliffe and Columbia Law School; getting married and having two children; her brother attending Yale and becoming a teacher; her feelings about Germany and Hungary; returning several times to Hungary to see her paternal grandmother; her novel and memoir about her mother and grandmother; working for the Civil Rights Division within the Department of Justice; being the director for the Committee of Concerned Scientists advocating for Russian scientists; how hearing classical music brings back memories of her childhood; feeling she is American; and her thoughts on communism.

Liya Kaplinskaya, born on August 3, 1936 in Moscow, Russia, discusses her father Naum Kaplinsky (born in Mazyr, Belarus) and her mother Ida Wolfson (born in Slavnoe, Belarus); her sister Fania (born in 1940); her parents, who both had college educations and were not members of the Communist Party; her father’s work in the Ministry of Trade; not experiencing a religious education and not knowing she was Jewish until 1943; living in a communal house in the center of Moscow; the war beginning in 1941 when she was in kindergarten; her father enlisting in a volunteer army because he had bad eyesight; last hearing from her father by letter in October 1941; traveling with her mother and sister in December 1941 in a crowded train car (originally used for animals) and not having enough food since they left in a hurry and were very frightened; living in Novosibirsk, Siberia; her mother working in the relocated Ministry of Trade office; wearing felt boots in the very cold weather; attending kindergarten; her sister being very sick and being in the hospital for two months; returning to Moscow in the summer of 1943; going to school; how after the war, German prisoners of war worked on construction sites in Moscow, and people from the nearest houses brought them bread; her anger at the German prisoners of war because they had killed her father; fireworks at war’s end but her mother crying because Naum had not returned; moving to a building closer to her mother’s office; the Soviets controlling the radio programming; studying electrical engineering for six years at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute, then working at the Institute of Automation of the Coal Industry; having a passport with the word "Jew” stamped in it; going to a youth festival in the summer of 1957 and meeting her husband there; visiting mines in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan while working; getting married and having two children; her husband who was a scientist and as a visiting professor worked six months in Russia and six months in the United States after 1995; becoming a US citizen in 2005; her husband passing away in 2008; being reminded in Russia that she was part of a suppressed minority as a Jew; going to a synagogue for the first time in the US; volunteering at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum; her feeling that the Holocaust could happen again; her notion that the Germans have accepted the past but that Russians and Ukrainians have not; being grateful every day that her children and grandchildren are in the US; and feeling that people are recognized as individuals in the US, while they are seen as part of a crowd in Russia.

Howard Chester Bowman, born on April 2, 1923 in Danzig, Germany, discusses his childhood; his father Howard Arthur Bowman, who was an American consul stationed in Danzig; his mother Alma, who was German; living in several different places as a child, including Saloniki (Greece), Trieste (Italy), Sault Ste. Marie (Canada), Mexicali (Mexico), and Glasgow (Scotland); being raised as an Episcopalian; studying economics at the university in Glasgow; attending Swarthmore in Pennsylvania for three semesters; joining the U.S. Army in November 1942; studying German at Lehigh University for one year under the Army Specialized Training Project; completing basic training at Camp Pickett in Virginia; arriving at Camp Ritchie in Cascade, MD in February 1944 for intelligence training as a “Ritchie Boy”; being a member of Class number 16 with German, Austrian, and Hungarian refugees who were taken to Martinsburg, West Virginia to become immediate U.S. citizens (such as George Lamm, Henry Hecksher, and Peter Van Eyck); studying the manual “German Order of Battle”; reading German maps and army documents; learning how to interrogate prisoners; having instructors who were German and Austrian refugees, such as Ernest Block; living in a barrack; entering as a private and finishing as a lieutenant and as an assistant interrogator in German; being sent to Atlanta, GA and Tennessee to be embedded with German POWs who were Nazi sympathizers (they liked to sing the German song “When Jewish blood spurts from German knives” and labeled the New York Times as a Jewish newspaper because the word “Times” read backwards sounds like Semite); returning to Camp Ritchie to get an assignment in August 1944; sailing on the “Mauretania”; going to France and joining the 20th Armored Division; going through Holland and the Low Countries to Munich, Germany; entering Dachau and seeing the dying inmates and medics helping survivors; staying one day in the camp; bringing one survivor who was a non-Jewish Communist to his apartment and giving him food and clothes; seeing a truck from Gross-Rosen on the side of the road filled with bags of gold teeth, jewelry, and money; seeing a Red Cross truck and taking the doctor who was in the truck to army headquarters to deliver a message to stop bombing buildings in a certain area as they were filled with U.S. soldiers (Howard received the Bronze Star for this action); being close to Jewish IPW (Interrogators of Prisoners of War) team members Ernst Simon, Adolph Warner, Hyman Rosenfeld, Irving Endig, and the team commander Jacob Berger; celebrating V-E Day; transferring to Oberursel, Germany to edit intelligence reports from interrogated German generals as head of the editorial staff; returning to the U.S. in the summer of 1946; being discharged and returning to Swarthmore; graduating then joining the CIA; spending eight years in Berne (Switzerland), seven years in Vienna (Austria), four years in Athens (Greece), 14 years in Germany (Munich, Bonn, and Berlin); retiring but continuing to do contract work for the CIA; being amazed that such a highly civilized country could have done what it did; and how he still thinks about Dachau and his friends whose families did not survive.

Gerald Abraham Schwab, born February 19, 1925 in Freiburg, Germany, discusses his parents and sister; the increasing restrictions on Jews beginning in 1933; being taken on a Kindertransport to Switzerland in April 1933; returning to Germany in 1940 to get visas to go to the United States with his family; arriving in New York City in May 1940; being drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943; his assignments in the army, including acting as an interpreter for General Mark Clark’s staff in the 5th Army; acting as an interpreter at the Nuremburg trials after leaving the army; his conversations with the defendants and his impressions; working for the documentation center in 1946; returning to the U.S.; attending the University of Chicago and Stanford University; his research on the Herschel Grynzpan case; writing The day the Holocaust began: The Odyssey of Herschel Grynzpan; and his work for the Historian’s office at the USHMM.

Bernard Pasternak, born August 17, 1924 in Viseu de Sus, Romania, describes being on a death march when he was liberated from Buchenwald by American soldiers; surviving typhus and starvation; receiving help from General Patton’s army; reuniting with his three sisters and their attempts to locate their father, eventually learning that he had been killed when Theresienstadt was bombed; returning to their village in Romania and being well-received; earning a certificate in electric work in 1948 in the displaced persons camp in Salzburg, Austria and much later becoming a metallurgic engineer; arriving in New York City in December of 1949; meeting his wife; his involvement in union matters at work; his three sons and the involvement of their children in Holocaust education; his Zionist faith; and following Israeli politics and culture.

Kurt Pauly, born March 26, 1930 in Aachen, Germany, describes his family’s escape from Germany in 1936; living in Palestine until 1938 when his family moved to the United States; living in Cincinnati, OH and then Vineland, NJ; being drafted in 1951 for the Korean War; his discharge after a serious accident while training; attending the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania from which he graduated in 1958; marrying his wife Jill, also a survivor, in 1957; moving to Washington, DC in 1974 and retiring in 1992, at which time both he and his wife applied to volunteer at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; visiting Israel; returning to Germany in 1983 and again in 1997 by invitation to talk about his life after leaving Germany; and the ways in which his experiences as a survivor and as a Holocaust Museum volunteer have affected his political views.

Learn about over 1,000 camps and ghettos in Volume I and II of this encyclopedia, which are available as a free PDF download. This reference provides text, photographs, charts, maps, and extensive indexes.